DEATH OF MISS ADELAIDE IRONSIDE.

West Coast Times, Issue 589, 14 August 1867, Page 4

DEATH OF MISS ADELAIDE IRONSIDE.

("BOM THE SIDNEY 3IOBNING HEEALD, JUDY 21) We regret to learn, from the "Athenaeum" of May 11, tliat Miss Ironside is no more. The Naples correspondent of that journal gives the following touching particulars of the sad event: — Naples, April 30, 1867. — Not many months have passed away since I recorded the merits of the lady artists in Borne. English and American, French and German, they attract the admiration of all visitors hy the grace and beauty of their conceptions; but in that brilliant constellation there shone no brighter star than Adelaide Ironside, who has just disappeared. I shall never forget when, at the request of Gibson, I paid my first visit to her studio, the impression which she made upon me before I had the privilege of looking at her creations. Full of nervous sensibility, she was the impersonation of genius ; her mind wastoo active for the delicate framein which it dwelt, and it required not the gift of prophecy to see that one possessed of so many endowments would shortly pass away. As a child she was a poet and a painter. Many of her most infantine productions were wonders of art ; and even had she been limited to the illustration of the glories of her native Australia, she would j still have left behind her a name and repution not soon to be forgotten. But her dream was Home. There was no repose for her •until it was realised ; and after overcoming what to many would have been impossibilities, she found peace in that cradle of art. When she arrived in the Eternal City I cannot say, nor can I giye any details of her life ; but a mutual friend, herself a star of no secondary magnitude, writes to me in terms of such affectionate and generous lamentation for her that I cannot do better than send what I feel assured you will publish : — "My first word is to crave only such space as a white rose might cover, in memory of a flower that has dropt out of the wrpath. It was on Sunday, the 14th of April, that I kissed for the last time the pure delicate face and high white forehead of Adelaide Ironside, just dead. You remember her Australian flowers, painted as never were flowers painted before ; her Iris-winged angels, that made one think she had been amongst them; her rich, Titianlike coloring, united to a purity of feeling, that recalled the visions of Beato Angelico ; her beautiful poem in painting, with its too prophetic title, 'Ars longa, vita brevis ;' and her picturesque poetry, so graceful and original ! You did not perhaps know what she most bitterly felt — the suspension for two years from her beloved labors imposed upon her by the cruel malady that consumed her young life. Still young and fair, she was more like a girl of twenty in face and figure and mind than a woman of thirtyfive, so simple and innocent her life had been ; and yet she was born on the 17th of November, in 1831. - She was the pet of Gibson. ' I was angry with her one day ;' he said to me ' but, by George ! I could not scold her when I saw her sweet smile and heard her sweet voice.' "

REASsmroro- Intelligence. — There is now no doubt that the King of Prussia will go to Paris to see the Great Exhibition. We believe we may state arrangements have been concluded for a pacific demonstration to be conjointly made in public by King William and Napoleon the Third. At a fite which is to be given in the Place de la Concorde, their Majesties will amuse themselves and entertain the spectators with a game of see-faw — the King seated at one end of the plank, and the Emperor at the other, in exact equilibrium, to symbolise the balance of power in Europe. —"Punch." Nipt in the Bud— Young Fitz (attache, late clerk at the Tape and Sealing-wax office) — " Yaas — wather pwido myself on my flowers. Used to cost me fifty pounds a yeaw when I was at the Awffice." — Guileless Being. — "Dear me ! how very little you must have had to live on." Wo do, not want precepts bo mud* as ¥$m-. * "' ■