New-York Tribune, August 7, 1841
‘But what of the Queen?’ you will say; ‘ and how does she look?’ - so natural is curiosity about one so young, and the accident heir to such a fortune. A lady too! Well, I will first tell you how she does not look. She does not look like any one of the thousand portraits I have seen of her. Painters may call them resemblances, but they are not like her. Sully’s is a fine picture, but too magnificent. The London artists have made numberless attempts; the windows are full of prints, the studios of busts, and the museums and bazaars of wax figures; but if any are curious enough to know how she does look, they must come to London, as I have done, and take a good long look at her.
She was twenty-two last May, but she does not appear so old. She is a little, delicate, fair-faced girl, with very light blue eyes, and glossy light hair, smoothly dressed off her forehead. Her teeth do not show as in her portraits, though I suppose they do a little when her face is at rest. I should call her rather pretty; there is a decided expression of gentle, innocent, girlish sweetness in her countenance - just such a face as one who looks on it may well remember for a day, and pray that it may never be clouded with the cares and splendid misery of a station such as hers. I do not know that hers is a crown of thorns; but I thought, and perhaps she thought, as she looked quickly and anxiously about her on the crown, of the mad and wicked attempt, not long since made near that very spot, to assassinate her and her husband, by a boy of eighteen.
Prince Albert is decidedly a handsome young man; and though he wears the abominable mustachios which almost brutalize the faces of three-fourths of the fashionables here, he appears to be a modest, unassuming, quiet, family kind of a personage. He keeps himself entirely clear of the politics of the day, and is never spoken of by any one except as the Queen’s husband.
