of--perhaps it would be truer to say that they have been adapted to--an imagination, which reverences the character in man and can picture and suggest the individual in relation to the larger issues of his time; with a capacity of emotional expression that has the added poignancy of compression. It has been, indeed, continually reënforced by the grandeur of the themes that have confronted him, and the result upon his technique is a gravity of distinction which represents the finest kind of style. In that smaller kind of style which is limited to the actual technique of modelling it would be possible to mention sculptors who far excel Saint-Gaudens; but in those qualities of broader and deeper reference wherein brain and sensibility coöperate with hand for high creative and poetic ends I doubt if he has any superior among modern artists. Let us trace the gift of idealising as it appears in several of his works, selected because they represent a descending scale from the purely ideal to the idealised fact. And first the statue of “Grief” in the Rock Creek Cemetery. I made the pilgrimage from Washington one sunny autumn afternoon with a companion. The gatekeeper directing us, we threaded our way along the labyrinth of paths, among the chaos of conflicting monuments, so many of which testify to impotence of taste. Finally a glance behind a hedge of cypress--we are indeed on holy ground! Within the little enclosure of solemn greenery a bench, marble and of Greek design, invites to sit; the world is all outside, and here before us, raised upon a slight pedestal, enough to lift it above the level, but not too high for close and intimate communion, is the Presence: a woman’s seated figure, wrapped about in coarse drapery that shrouds her head and falls in long, loose, heavy folds at her feet. We have heard the story: That a husband, robbed of his wife with shocking suddenness, called upon the sculptor to express in plastic shape the void in his life, enjoining him to ignore all symbols of hope and to give utterance only to the consuming hopelessness of loss. And here before us--in the isolation of the figure, in the uncompromising sternness of the drapery, in the majestic agony of the face, the eyelids lowered in pain, the lips full and set in the effort of endurance and also in a protest as proud as it is despairing--there is expressed a universality of grief that sums up the sorrow of the modern world, as well as the eternal question of the why and to what end. Under the spell of it a wife and husband sit on into the golden afternoon, chastened, purified, elevated, drawn closer to each other by the realisation of the mystery of grief, and with a renewed sense of the sanctity of happiness ere the shadow falls. Here indeed is an idealisation, complete and absolute; no helping out with wings and symbols, but the rendering of a simple, natural fact--a woman in grief; yet with such deep and embracing