Date: 1789

"Thee Queen of Shadows! [Fancy]--shall I still invoke, / Still love the scenes thy sportive pencil drew, / When on mine eyes the early radiance broke / Which shew'd the beauteous, rather than the true!"

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1789

"Ah! hide for ever from my sight / The faithless flatterer Hope--whose pencil, gay, / Portrays some vision of delight, / Then bids the fairy tablet fade away; / While in dire contrast, to mine eyes / Thy phantoms, yet more hideous, rise, / And Memory draws, from Pleasure's wither'd flower, / Corr...

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1793

"[Y]et, half repentant now / Her headlong haste, she wishes she had staid / To die with those affrighted Fancy paints / The lawless soldiers' victims."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1791, 1806

"Then spare, thou sweet Urchin, thou soother of pain, / Oh! spare the soft picture engrav'd on my heart; / As a record of Love let it ever remain; / My bosom thy tablet--thy pencil a dart."

— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)

Date: 1810

"For the mark'd lines that Memory's tints display / In contemplation's fire will melt away,"

— Seward, Anna (1742-1809)

Date: 1810

"No picture, be it ever so well painted, can vie with the memory in that exactness, with which she presents, early in absence, the image of that form and face, whose lineaments are dear to us"

— Seward, Anna (1742-1809)

Date: 1810

"Therefore, actual pictures of beloved friends would not be so eagerly coveted, but that we render this darling, internal image indistinct, by recalling it too frequently; as that strength of line, which gives sharpness and spirit to a copper-plate, becomes injured after a certain number of impre...

— Seward, Anna (1742-1809)

Date: 1810

An internal image is like a copper plate: "By repeated use, the plate, if not retouched, will produce only a dim and shadowy mass, in which the features and countenance cannot be very distinctly discerned."

— Seward, Anna (1742-1809)

Date: 1810

"So it is with the memory, after continual recurrence, and pressure of the affections upon the image she presents, which, for a considerable period, she had presented with that perfect precision, to which no powers of the pencil can attain;--but, in time, the image becomes indistinct, not from an...

— Seward, Anna (1742-1809)

Date: 1810

"Yes, it is beneath the constant glow of ardent imagination, that the impression, given by memory, has faded. Then it is that a good, nay even an indifferent picture, or a paper-profile of a dear lost friend, strengthens our recollection, in the same manner that retouching a copper-plate restores...

— Seward, Anna (1742-1809)