him for his friends. I have outlined a true poet, and a fine fellow-fill up the picture to your liking.

GEO. R. GRAHAM, ESQ.

Yours, very truly,

N. P. WILLIS.

IRVING.

WE spoke, the other day, of Geoffrey Crayon's having once more consented to sit for his picture. Mr. Martin has just finished it, and we fancy there has seldom been a more felicitous piece of work. It is not only like Irving, but like his books— and, though he looks as his books read, (which is true of few authors) and looks like the name of his cottage, Sunnysideand looks like what the world thinks of him-yet a painter might have missed this look, and still have made what many would consider a likeness. He sits, leaning his head on his hand, with the genial, unconscious, courtly composure of expression that he habitually wears, and still there is visible the couchant humour and philosophical inevitableness of perception, which form the strong under-current of his genius. The happy temper and the strong intellect of Irving-the joyously indolent man and the arousably brilliant author-are both there. As a picture, it is a fine specimen of Art. The flesh is most skilfully crayoned, the pose excellent, the drawing apparently effortless and yet nicely true, and the air altogether Irving-y and gentlemanlike. If well engraved, we have him-delightful and famous Geoffrey-as he lives, as he is thought to live, as he writes, as he talks, and as he ought to be remembered

JENNY LIND.

THERE is great competition to be the painter of Jenny Lind. Mr. Barnum, we understand, has engaged a portrait for his palace of Iranistan, and we are permitted to mention only the fact-not the artist. The applications are The applications are numerous for the honour of limning her admired countenance. We should suppose Garbeille might make a charming statuette of Jenny Lind curtsying. It is then that she is most unlike anybody else, and, where character is to be seized, Garbeille is the master. George Flagg is admirable at cabinet portraits, (half the size of life,) and has lately finished one of Fanny Kemble, which is a superb piece of design and colour. He would paint her well.

It seems to us that no one, of the dozen engravings purporting to represent Jenny Lind, has any reasonable likeness to her, as we have seen her. And, indeed, the longer we live, the more we are convinced that people see the same features very differently, and that one face may make two as different impressions on two beholders, as if they had been all the while looking on two different faces. To our notion, Jenny Lind has never been painted truly. We have seen fifty likenesses of her—in Germany, France, England, and Nassau street-and the picture in our mind's eye is the likeness of quite another woman.

258

LIKENESSES OF JENNY LIND.

The truth is, that God never yet lit the flame of a great soul in a dark lantern; and, though the divine lamp burning within Jenny Lind may not be translucent to all eyes, it is, to others, perfectly visible through the simple windows of her honest face, and could be painted-by any artist who could see past the putty on the sash. Her living features seem to us illuminated with an expression of honest greatness, sublimely simple and unconscious, and in no picture of her do we see any trace of this. It is a face, to our eye, of singular beauty-beauty that goes past one's eye and is recognized within-and the pictures of her represent the plainest of common-place girls. Why, a carpenter's estimate, with the inches of her nose, cheeks, lips and eyes, all cyphered up on a shingle, would be as true a likeness of her as most of these engravings. Have we no American artist who can give us Jenny Lind's face with its expression?

We were pained to see, when the fair songstress came forward to the lights, that her fatigues, for the past two or three weeks, had made their mark upon her. She looked pale and worn, and her step and air were saddened and un-elastic. This continued, even to the end of her second performance, and we began to have apprehensions that she was too indisposed to be equal to her evening's task. But, with the cavatina from the Somnambula, the inspiration came. She sang it newly, to our ear. It seemed as if she had, heretofore, sung always with a reserve of power. This was the first time that she had seemed (to us) to give in to the character, and allow her soul to pour its impassioned tenderness fully upon the dramatic burthen of the music. Could any one, who heard that overpowering flood of heart-utterance, (conveying the mournfulness of a wrongfully accused woman, singing in

SYMPATHY IN PERSONATION.

259

her dream,) doubt, afterwards, the fervor and intensity of the nature of Jenny Lind? More eloquent and passionate sounds came never from human lips, we are well persuaded. If she ever lacks in the "passionateness" called for by Italian music, or suffers by comparison with Grisi and others in this respect, we shall believe, hereafter, that it is only because she cannot consent to embark passionateness on the tide of the character she represents. A Lucrezia Borgia's "passion," for example, she would not portray with a full abandonment a Somnambula's, she would. Her capability of expressing feeling-pure feelingto its uttermost depth and elevation, is beyond cavil, it seems

to us.

We found, after Jenny Lind had gone from the city, on her first visit, that we retained no definite remembrance of her features. We had nothing by which we could assure ourselves whether one likeness was more true than another; and, indeed, no one of them—not even a daguerreotype-was reasonably like our feeling of what a likeness should be. We determined, this time, first to study the lineaments, by themselves, and then, if possible, to see how so marvellous a transformation was brought about, as is necessary to present to the eye her frequent looks of inspiration and even of exalted beauty. Our close scrutiny satisfied us, that it is only by looking at her features separately, that any degree of truthfulness can be found in the daguerreotype likenesses which have been published. The entire look, taken in connection with the rest of her figure, though she only stands before the audience waiting the completion of the prelude to her song, represents a totally different image from the one your mind has received by looking at her picture. It is fortunate that it is so-careless as she is about letting any body picture her, as