Now, if this maiden can keep on holding her head up, with looks perpetually “commercing with the skies” so that it will be impossible for her to see all the tobacco-juice and apple-cores beneath and round about her, it will conduce greatly to her peace of mind. I am sorry that “the Pantheon of America” is not a cleaner looking place. It’s a pity, as we have a Pantheon, that its shabbiness and dirt should flourish to a degree that is absolutely melancholy. I am sure it was in obedience to the law of fitness that the committee of the Congressional Library or some other committee, brought the Goddess of Melancholy in here, to hold her eyes and nose aloft, and to stand supreme queen, regnant of dust and gloom and American “expectoration.” “Hail! divinest Melancholy.” I am glad, judging by your face, that you are of the lymphatic temperament, and that consequently, all this dirt will afflict you less than it does me. But the more I look at your impassive and soulless countenance the more I fear that, after all, you are but a feeble counterfeit of Milton’s goddess or of the divine maiden conceived and born in, “Woody, Ida’s inmost grove.” In speaking of this marble, my heart will not let me forget that it was wrought by a hand self-taught; yet no less, standing where it does, it must be measured—somewhat, at least—by the standards of art. The figure, diminutive even in its femininity, suffers to insignificance by being set almost directly behind the gaunt and elongated form of Miss Ream’s “Lincoln;” yet it is in the figure, in its _posé_ and gentle curves, its chaste and graceful drapery, “the stole of cypress lawn, over the decent shoulders drawn” in the firm yet delicate hand which holds it in its place—in these only it is that the artist has caught and fastened in stone the aspect of the “goddess, sage and holy.” The face is meaningless. Not a line, not a curve, not an expression indicates a capacity for melancholy, contemplation or anything else emotional or intellectual. No mortal woman ever really meditated for a minute who did not get her hair pushed back further from her eyes than this, but these regulation locks run straight down the little, senseless Greek face in a mathematical angle, indissolubly banded by a little perked up helmet, embossed with seven stars. Why these stars? “Il Penserosa” was not nearly enough related to “that starred Ethiop queen” Cassiope, to have borrowed the helmet to wear even in the old Hall of the old House of Representatives “in the United States of America.”