Over thy decent shoulders drawn;
Come, but keep thy wonted state
With even step and musing gait,
And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.”
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.”
As for the Ream statue of Lincoln, (like many people,) the first glance at it is the most satisfactory that you will ever have. It will never look as well again. Some declare this very palpable lack to be in the subject—Mr. Lincoln’s own face and form—but many others note it to be in this representation of them. Mr. Lincoln’s living face was one of the most interesting ever given to man. There was more than fascination in its rugged homeliness; there was in it the deeper attraction of suffering and sympathy. It outrayed from every line engraven there by human pain and love and longing. But no soul can put into a statue or painting more than it has in itself. In this statue of Mr. Lincoln we have his rude outward image, unilluminated by one mental or spiritual characteristic. It is mechanical, material, opaque. Mrs. Sarah Ames, in her bust of Lincoln, which stands just behind our friend, “Il Penserosa,” has transfixed more of the soul of Lincoln in the brow and eyes of his face than Miss Ream has in all the weary outline of her many feet of marble. In the bust the lower part of the face is idealized into weakness. Without his gauntness and ruggedness Lincoln is not Lincoln. But any one who ever saw and felt the deep, tender, sad outlook of his living humanity must thank Mrs. Ames for having reflected and transfixed it in the brows and eyes of this marble.
Just outside of its alcove, at the right hand of the door which enters the New House of Representatives, stand side by side, the two statues from Rhode Island—one of General Green, the other of Roger Williams. That of General Green is spirited and exquisitely fine in detail; while that of Roger Williams is the one ideal statue in our Pantheon. Both were executed in Rome—the first by Henry R. Brown, the second by Franklin Simmons, of Providence, Rhode Island. No portrait of Roger Williams being in existence, Mr. Simmons has evolved from imagination and his inner consciousness a quaint, poetic figure and a dreamlike face, above whose lifted eyelids seems to hover a seraphic smile. Then it is refreshing to turn from the stove-pipe hats, shingled heads and angular garments in which the men of our generation do penance, to the flowing locks, puckered knee-breeches, with their dainty tassels, and the ample ruffs in which the holy apostle of liberty represents his name and time. He holds a book in his hand, on whose cover is inscribed the words, “Soul Liberty,” and, with open, uplifted glance and free posé seems about to step forward into air, with lips just ready to open with words of inspiration.