They were not torn up by the roots to live in a strange land. Yes, the main impediment in early American art was spiritual rather than material. When we see to-day in some lonely, half-forgotten New England village a spacious, nobly-designed, admirably-built meeting-house, capping the very crest of a high rock-ribbed hill of exceeding difficulty, (the church at Acworth will serve as an example) we uncover our heads before the efforts of our fathers to erect a house of prayer. The spirit moved them. Nothing less would have sufficed in what they did and suffered. The obstacles in their path were many and great, but being material, were surmounted. In our early strivings toward sculpture, the obstacles were both spiritual and material, and generally speaking, the obstacles won the day. We had no noteworthy early native sculpture, largely because we lacked the passion to create it. That passion was not dead, but it lay dormant during the long wintry season that preceded the spring of our national consciousness. In the mean time, men and women died, and had their humble carved slate headstones; ships put out to sea, glorying in their robust wooden figure-heads of American make. Benjamin West’s legendary adventure with his cat’s-fur brushes and his Amerind colors and his baby sister’s likeness no doubt had its sculptural counterpart in the creative endeavor of many an unknown fire-side whittler. These obscure dramas of artistic effort counted; though meagre and lowly, they were not in vain; they made for craftsmanship, art’s helper. Referring to more important matters, we do not forget William Rush’s full-length statue of Washington, hewn from wood, or his soldierly self-portrait, carved from a pine log; or the early efforts, in portraiture, of Dixey, in New Jersey, of Augur in Connecticut; of John Frazee, that young stone-cutter to whom we owe the first marble portrait bust chiseled in the United States, as late as the year 1824. We remember also the Browere life-masks, created by a secret process, and useful still as historic data.