The great mistake with Mr. Powers has been his oversight regarding these limits. There has been debate, hesitation, and a continual wandering away from the duties of his errand. Years have been devoted to those ghosts of sculpture, allegorical figures; other years wasted in the elaboration of machinery. Not that his ideal statues are worthless, or fall short of great beauty and exquisite delicacy; not that his skill as a mechanician is other than great. But the age cannot afford these things, nor can the sculptor afford them. A year is too great a sum to give for a statue of California. Better than that, the several portraits of valued men which might have been acquired,--one bust, even, like those which surprised and compelled the reverence of Thorwaldsen. Better the perfected ability which would have given his country the Webster he should and might have made than a hundred "Americas." There are two considerations which may have misled Mr. Powers. One, a pecuniary one, which he should have disposed of as did Agassiz, when such was advanced to induce him to give lyceum lectures:--"Sir, I cannot afford to make money!" The other may have been the weight of the prevailing error that portrait-sculpture is a less honorable branch of Art. Less than what? The historical? What finer history than Titian's Paul III., Raphael's Leo X., Albert Dürer's head of himself? What finer than the Pericles, the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, the Demosthenes of the Vatican, Chantrey's Scott, Houdon's Voltaire, Powers's Jackson?--Heroic? what more heroic than the Lateran Sophocles, the Venetian Colleoni, or Rauch's statue of Frederick the Great?--Poetical? What picture more sweetly poetical than Raphael's head of himself in the Uffizi, or Giotto's Dante in the Bargello? What _ideal_ statue surpasses in poetical power Michel Angelo's De' Medici in the San Lorenzo Chapel? What ideal head is more beautiful than the Townley Clytie of the British Museum, or the Young Augustus of the Vatican? What grander than Da Vinci's portrait of himself? No,--when the sculptor has wrought the adequate representation of the individual in its best estate, he may rest assured that he has achieved "high Art." Let us not be unjust to Mr. Powers's ideal works. In the qualities of chasteness of conception, delicacy of treatment, temperate grace, and that rarer, finer quality of dignified repose, they have not been surpassed since the time of Greek Art. When the subject chosen has not been foreign to the artist's nature, as in the "Eve," nor foreign to the Art's province, as in the "California," his success has been very like a triumph.