as a piece of statuary pure and simple, but as a decorative finial, to be seen from a distance, at which the pose and the outline would alone be significant. Considered in this light, it is a captivating performance, graceful, picturesque, and a good illustration of what ensues to the public advantage when an artist improves an opportu nity of the sort usually left to a mechanic. But it is not by work in this vein that Saint-Gaudens is known. For evidence of his imaginative power as applied to themes apart from the movement of contemporary life, we must look to his draped figures.

Among these there stand some works of extraordinary nobility. They are variations on a type which he created more than twenty years ago. He showed then that he could carve an angel which would be neither fantastic nor sentimental, but simply an image of spir ituality. Fate was unkind. The three figures for the Morgan tomb at Hartford were destroyed by fire. But even in the photograph of one of them which lies before me as I write, the loveliness of the sculptor's ideal of feminine form is obvious. The angel stands with hands outstretched, holding a scroll from which she sings. An expression of peaceful happiness irradiates the pure features. The loose-flowing robe, confined at the waist with a girdle of leafage, is marked by many rippling folds. It

is a beautiful figure, the attitude is perfect, and, above all, this angel expresses an imaginative idea. The same idea recurs, somewhat modified, in the caryatides executed for the house of Cornelius Vanderbilt, in the Smith tomb at Newport, and in the similar relief which, with a group of medallions, represents Saint-Gaudens in the Luxem bourg. It is an idea of delicate form, interpenetrated with an emotion peculiarly sweet, spiritual, and reposeful. The key is tenderly poetic, elegiac. Romantic as it is, it still does not exhaust his scope. There is another work de monstrating that Saint-Gaudens could, when he chose, rise to a tragic plane. This, the Adams monument at Washington, is, for a kind of restrained grandeur, not only the finest thing of its kind ever produced by an American sculptor, but an achievement which modern Europe has not surpassed.

The single figure in this monument sits enveloped in heavy drapery on a rough-hewn block of granite, against a wall of the same material. Her face is visible; the right hand is raised to support the chin, and one sees the bare arm to the elbow; but, for the rest, the form is muffled as in unearthly garments. It is a mysterious, sphinx-like presence, strange and massive, with something of terror, but more of solemn dignity and beauty, in its broad simple lines. Her riddle is past finding out. All that we