Whose youth bore no flower on its branches, whose hopes burned in ashes away,
From whose hands slipped the prize they had grasped at, who stood at the dying of day
With the wreck of their life all around them. . . .”
In this poem Mr. Story touched the highest note of his life,—as poet, sculptor, painter, or writer of prose; in no other form of expression has he equalled the sublimity of sentiment in these lines:—
“. . . I stand on the field of defeat,
In the shadow, with those who are fallen, and wounded, and dying, and there
*****
Hold the hand that is helpless, and whisper, ‘They only the victory win
Who have fought the good fight, and have vanquished the demon that tempts us within;
Who have held to their faith unseduced by the prize that the world holds on high;
Who have dared for a high cause to suffer, resist, fight,—if need be, to die.’”
Such a poem must have its own immortality in lyric literature.
For a period of forty years the home of the Storys in Palazzo Barberini was a noted centre of the most charming social life. Mr. Story’s literary work—in his contributions of essays and poems to the Atlantic Monthly; in his published works, the “Roba di Roma,” “Conversations in a Studio,” his collected “Poems,” and others—gave him a not transitory rank in literature which rivals, if it does not exceed, his rank in art.
Meantime other artists were to take up their permanent abode in the Seven-hilled City,—Elihu Vedder in 1866; Franklin Simmons two years later; Waldo and Julian Story, the two sons of William Wetmore Story, though claiming Rome as their home, are American by parentage and ancestry; and Mr. Waldo Story succeeds his father in pursuing the art of sculpture in the beautiful studios in the Via San Martino built by the elder Story. In 1902 Charles Walter Stetson, with his gifted wife, known to the contemporary literary world by her maiden name, Grace Ellery Channing, set up their household gods and lighted their altar fires in the city by the Tiber, ready, it may be, to exclaim with Ovid:—
“Four times happy is he, and times without number is happy,
Who the city of Rome uninterdicted enjoys.”
