of Lincoln's life is represented, no special branch of his public usefulness or of his intellectual endowment is emphasized, all are suggested in the symbolic reach of the conception. But the rendering of this conception is realistic in the best sense of the word. The pose is simple, natural, individually characteristic as far removed from the conventionally dramatic or "sculpturesque" as from the baldly commonplace. Neither physical facts nor facts of costume are palliated or adorned. Even the chair is in general outline such a one as Lincoln might very possibly have used. It is idealized only by its massiveness and its unobtrusive decoration, and the figure is idealized only by refinement and breadth and vigor in treatment. What we see are realities, but we see them suffused with poetic thought and typical explanatory meanings, and ennobled though not altered by the subtile touch of art: and the reposeful composition speaks to us with true dramatic intensity. Examine the figure more narrowly and see how rich it is in significance, how it carries out in every line the fundamental ideas which inspired the composition as a whole. This Lincoln, with his firmly planted feet, his erect body, and his squared shoulders, stands as a man accustomed to face the people and sway them at his will, while the slightly drooped head and the quiet, yet not passive hands express the meditativeness, the self-control, the conscientiousness of the philosopher who reflected well before he spoke, of the moralist who realized to the full the responsibilities of utterance. The dignity of the man and his simplicity; his strength, his inflexibility and his tenderness; his goodness and his courage; his intellectual confidence and his humility of soul; the poetic cast of his thought, the homely vigor of his manner, and the underlying sadness of his spirit,- all these may be read in the wonderfully real yet ideal portrait which the sculptor has created. And they are all so expressed, I repeat, as to reveal not only the man himself but the various directions in which he brought his great qualities to bear.

Having said as much as this, it is almost needless to comment upon the technical merits of the work. No such meaning, no such message could have made itself felt through any but the most accomplished hand. When we find for the first time a portrait which really shows us the inner Lincoln we are not surprised to find it the first one which from a purely sculptural point of view has dealt successfully with his outward aspect. This aspect was impressive, imposing, inspiring, attractive by reason of the spirit which shone through it; and, naturally, an artist who failed to reveal that spirit could make little of the rough yet noble husk which sheathed it. The lesson thus taught is a

priceless one. It proves that even the most difficult task of the most "modern" kind is not beyond the power of the sculptor's art to master; but that it can only be mastered when that art signifies intellectual insight and creative force as well as trained perceptions and a skillful hand. Another valuable lesson may be read in the nature of that originality which I have claimed for the design as a whole. Strange as it may seem, no previous monumental composition had furnished a precedent for this. The world had had seated statues and standing statues in plenty; but a figure thus recently risen from its seat is that rarest of things—a true novelty in art. No novelty in art, however, is entitled to admiration simply as such. On the contrary, it is trebly bound to make manifest intrinsic worth. We cannot but criticise it with senses sharpened by the thought: If the idea is good, would not some great artist long ere this have conceived it and expressed it? The exceptional strength of Mr. St. Gaudens's talent shows not so much in the originality of his fundamental idea as in that treatment of it which has made it seem not merely a right idea but the only one adequate to his purpose. This implies, of course, that originality came not because it was sought as such, but naturally, inevitably, as a result of the conscientious effort to express a clear conception in the clearest and completest way.

In conclusion, it is most interesting to note the close ties which connect so original, individual a work as this with other great works of other kinds. The union of idealistic conception and realistic rendering which it reveals is almost always found when modern art is at its very best. But it also shows a union of perfect repose with strong dramatic significance, and this union is characteristic of classic art when at its best. There as here it is secured by the same expedient,- by the choice of a moment which is not the one of most vigorous action but the one in which such action is imminent.

The statue is of bronze, eleven and a half feet in height. The simple pedestal which supports it stands in the center of a platform some sixty feet in breadth by thirty in depth which is raised a few steps above the surface of a slight elevation near the entrance of Lincoln Park. Around three sides of the platform curves a stone seat upon the back of which one reads the name of Lincoln, with the dates of his birth and death, and upon the ends two characteristic citations from his own utterances. In the architectural portion of his work Mr. St. Gaudens was assisted by Mr. Stanford White, and together they have given us a monument which is the most precious the country yet possesses; which is not only our best likeness of Abraham Lincoln, but our finest work of monumental art.

M. G. van Rensselaer.

reached the gate, and "Howdy! Howdy!" came from the two sisters, to which Rachel answered with a cordial " Howdy! Come in!" meant for the three. When they reached the porch, she led the way through the open front door to the "settin' room" of the house, as the living-room was always called in that day. The fire-place looked like an extinct crater; curtains of narrow green slats hung at the windows, and the floor was covered by a new rag-carpet in which was imbedded a whole history of family costume; a patient geologist might have discovered in it traces of each separate garment worn in the past five years by the several members of the Albaugh family. The mantelpiece was commonplace enough, of "poplar" wood—that is, tulip-tree-painted brown. The paint while fresh had been scratched in rhythmical waves with a common coarse comb. This graining was supposed to resemble the grain of some wood yet undiscovered. The table at the side of the room farthest from the door had a cover of thin oilcloth decorated with flowers; most of them done in yellow. A tall wooden clock stood against the wall at the right of the door as you entered, and its slow ticking seemed to make the room cooler. For the rest, there was a black rocking-chair with a curved wooden seat and uncomfortable round slats in the back; there were some rank-and-file chairs besides, these were black, with yellow stripes; and there was a green settee with three rockers beneath and an arm at each end.

Henry Miller was a square-set young fellow, without a spark of romance in him. He had plowed corn all day, and he would have danced all night had the chance offered, and then followed the plow the next day. His sisters were like him, plain and of a square type that bespoke a certain sort of "Pennsylvania Dutch" ancestry, though the Millers had migrated to Illinois, not from Pennsylvania, but from one of the old German settlements in the valley of Virginia. Ike jumped out of the apple-tree to follow Virginia, the youngest of the Millers, into the house; there was between him and "Ginnie," as she was called, that sort of adolescent attachment, or effervescent reaction, which always appears to the parties involved in it the most serious interest in the universe, and to everybody else something deliciously ridiculous; a sort of burlesque of the follies of people more mature.

This was destined to be one of Rachel's "company evenings "; she had not more than seated the Millers and taken the girls' bonnets to a place of security, when there was a knock on the door-jamb. It was Mely McCord, who had once been a hired help in the Albaugh family. There were even in that day wide differences in wealth and education in Illinois,

but class demarcations there were not. Nothing was more natural than that Mely, who had come over from Hubbard township to visit some cousin in the neighborhood, should visit the Albaughs. Mely McCord was a girl-she was always called a girl, though now a little in the past tense - with a stoop in the shoulders, and hair that would have been better if it had been positively and decoratively red. As it was, her head seemed always striving to be red without ever attaining to any purity of color.

Half an hour later, McGill, an Irish bache lor of thirty-five, who, being county clerk, was prudently riding through the country in order to keep up his acquaintance with the voters, hitched his horse at the fence outside of the Albaugh gate, and came in just as Rachel was bringing a candle. Though he had no notion of cumbering himself with a family or with anything else likely to interfere with the freedom or pleasure of "an Irish gentleman," McGill was very fond of playing at gallantry, and he affected a great liking for what he called "faymale beauty," and plumed himself on the impression his own sprucely dressed person and plump face-a little overruddy, especially toward the end of the nose-might make on the sex. He never passed Albaugh's without stopping and enjoying a platonic flirtation with Rachel. George Lockwood arrived at the same time; he was a clerk in Wooden's store, at the county-seat village of Moscow, and he could manage, on his busiest days even, to spend half an hour in selling a spool of cotton thread to Rachel Albaugh. He had now come five miles in the vain hope of finding her alone. The country beauty appreciated the flattery of his long ride, and received his attention with a pleasure undisguised.

But George Lockwood's was no platonic sentiment. He watched intently every motion of Rachel's arms only half-hidden in her opensleeved dress; even the rustling of the calico of her gown made his heart flutter. He made a shame-faced effort to conceal his agitation; he even tried to devote himself to Mely McCord and the "Miller girls" now and then; but his eyes followed Rachel's tranquil movements, as she amused herself with McGill's bold flatteries, and Lockwood could not help turning himself from side to side in order to keep the ravishing vision in view when he was talking to some one else.

"You had better make the most of your chance, Mr. Lockwood," said pert little Virginia Miller, piqued by his absent-minded pretense of talking with her.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Oh, talk to Rachel while you can, for maybe after a while you can't!"

"Why can't I?”

"She's glad enough to talk to you now, but just you wait till Tom Grayson comes. If he should happen in to-night, what do you think would become of you?

"Maybe I'm not so dead in love as you think," he answered.

“You? You 're past hope. Your eyes go round the room after her like a sunflower twistin' its neck off to see the sun.”

"Pshaw!" said George. "You know better than that."

But Virginia noted with amusement that his smile of affected indifference was rather a forced one, and that he was "swallowing his feelings," as she put it. He took her advice as soon as he dared and crossed to where Rachel was sitting with the back of her chair against the jamb of the mantel-piece. Rachel was smiling a little foolishly at the shameless palaver of McGill, who told her that there was a ravishing perfiction about her faychers that he 'd niver sane surpassed, though he'd had the exquisite playsure of dancing with many of the most beautiful faymales in Europe. Rachel was a little sick of such unwatered sweetness, and was glad to have George Lockwood interrupt these frank criticisms of an appreciative connoisseur.

"I hear Tom Grayson outside now," said Mely McCord, in a half-whisper to Henry Miller. "George Lockwood won't be nowhere when he gits here"; and Mely's freckled face broke into ripples of delight at the evident annoyance which Lockwood began to show at hearing Grayson's voice on the porch. Tom Grayson was preceded by his sister Barbara, a rather petite figure, brunette in complexion, with a face that was interesting and intelligent, and that had an odd look hard to analyze, but which came perhaps, from a slight lack of symmetry. As a child, she had been called "cunning" in the popular American use of the word when applied to children; that is to say, piquantly interesting; and this characteristic of quaint piquancy of appearance she retained, now that she was a young woman of eighteen. Her brother Tom was a middle-sized, wellproportioned man, about two years older than she, of a fresh, vivacious countenance, and with a be-gone-dull-care look. He had a knack of imparting into any company something of his own cheerful heedlessness, and for this his society was prized. He spoke to everybody right cordially, and shook hands with all the company as though they had been his first cousins, looking in every face without reserve or suspicion, and he was greeted on all hands with a corresponding heartiness. But while Tom saluted everybody, his eye turned toward Rachel, and he made his way as quickly as

possible to the farther corner of the room where she was standing talking to George Lockwood. He extended his hand to her with a hearty

"Well, Rache, how are you? It would cure fever and ague to see you;" and then turning to Lockwood he said: "Hello, George! you out here! I would n't 'ave thought there was any other fellow fool enough to ride five miles and back to get a look at Rachel but me." And at that he laughed, not a laugh that had any derision in it, or any defiance, only the outbreaking of animal spirits that were unchecked by foreboding or care.

"I say, George," he went on, "let's go out and fight a duel and have it over. There's no chance for any of us here till Rachel's beaux are thinned out a little. If I should get you killed off out of the way, I suppose I should have to take Mr. McGill next."

"No, Tom, it's not with me you 'd foight, me boy. I've sane too many handsome girls to fight over them, though I have never sane such transcindent

"Ah, hush, now, Mr. McGill," said Rachel. "Faymale beauty 's always adorned by modesty, Miss Albaugh. I'll only add, that whoever Miss Rachel stoops to marry and McGill laughed a slow, complacent laugh as he put an emphasis on stoops – "I'll be a thorn in his soide, d' yeh mark that; fer to the day of me death I'll be her most devoted admirer"; and he made a half-bow at the close of this speech, with a quick recovery, which expressed his sense of the formidable character of his own personal charms.

But if McGill was a connoisseur of beauty he was also a politician too prudent to slight any one. He was soon after this paying the closest heed to Mely McCord's very spontaneous talk. He had selected Mely in order that he might not get a reputation for being "stuck up."

"Tom Grayson a'n't the leas' bit afeerd uh George Lockwood nur nobody else," said Mely rather confidentially to McGill, who stood with hands crossed under the tail of his blue-gray coat. "He all'ays wuz that away; a kind 'v a high-headed, don't-keer sort uv a feller. He'd better luck out, though. Rache 's one uh them skittish kind uh critters that don't stan' 'thout hitchin', an' weth a halter knot at that. Tom Grayson 's not the fust feller that's felt shore she wuz his 'n an' then found out kind uh suddently 't 'e wuz n't so almighty shore arter all. But, lawsee gracious! Tom Grayson a'n't afeerd uv nuthin', nohow. When the master wuz a-lickin' him wunst, at school, an' gin 'im three cuts, an' then says, says he, 'You may go now,' Tom, he jes lucks at 'im an' says uz peart's ever you see, says he, 'Gimme another to make it even numbers.""