HORATIO GREENOUGH was born

in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 6th September, 1805. He was put early to the best schools that were to be found in or around Boston. A strong, healthy, active boy, he excelled in athletic games, in running, jumping, swimming. He was also distinguished by fondness for literature, and a facility in committing English poetry to memory. Already in boyhood came out in marked prominence the ruling talent of his richly endowed nature. With such skill, and such taste in form and ornament, did he carve toys, cimeters, pistols of wood, that when detected at this employment in school hours, the ingenuity and beauty of his work so surprised his teachers, as to draw from them praise instead of the accustomed reprimand.

In his father's garden stood a marble statue of Phocion, a copy from the antique. This being constantly before his eyes, first bred in him a desire to attempt something in sculpture. His first efforts were in chalk. When he was yet only twelve years of age, a gentleman of Boston discerned so much merit in a copy he was making in chalk of a bust of John Adams, by Binon, that he took him to the Athenæum, and obtained for him, from Mr. Shaw, the director, free access to its valuable collection of engravings.

He was fortunate, as beginners seldom are, in the connections and influences of his boyhood and youth. His nascent genius for art was not thwarted, it was fostered. One gentleman, Mr. Solomon Willard, taught him to model in clay; another, Mr. Alpheus Cary, to cut marble. And best of all, his father, perceiving how strong was his bent, consented that he should make art and sculpture his chief study; only stipulating, with an enlightened judgment, that he should at the same time receive the best general instruction that could be obtained, and that therefore he should graduate at Cambridge. Accordingly he entered Harvard University in 1821, at the age of sixteen.

Drawing, modelling, anatomy, books on art, these now absorbed most of his time. But what was of greatest value to him while at Cambridge, was the friendship of Allston. In a letter to Mr. Dunlap, inserted in the "History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States," and dated Florence, December 1st, 1833, Mr. Greenough speaks as follows of Mr. Allston, and another friend whom he made during his college course:-"Mr. Cogswell," who was at

that time librarian of Harvard, and is now librarian of the Astor Library, "contributed perhaps more than any one to fix my purpose, and supplied me with casts, &c., to nurse my fondness for statuary. Allston, in the sequel, was to me a father, in what concerned my progress of every kind."

Towards the close of his senior year, he was permitted by the government of Harvard to leave college before the conclusion of the last term, without forfeiting his diploma, that he might avail himself of the opportunity of a vessel about to sail to Marseilles, to proceed to Italy. He reached Rome in the autumn of 1825. Surrounded by the unique incitements and facilities of that vast treasure-house of Art, he entered zealously on the course of study and labor that he had planned under the advice of Allston. But he had scarcely been in Rome a year, when his studies were suspended by a severe attack of illness, caused by the malaria. This obliged him to return home, and he arrived in Boston restored to health by the sea voyage.

After remaining a year in America, during which time he made busts of se veral distinguished public men in Washington, he returned to Italy, and took up his abode in Florence.

All

Now began the tug of life. He was ready and eager for work, but no work came. Taste for art had hardly yet begun to be diffused in the United States. The names of a few native painters were occasionally heard, Allston at the head of them; but even he was not yet appreciated. Sculptors there were none. Greenough first broke ground in this rich field. He had to brave the perils of a discoverer, to bear the hardships of a pioneer. the hardships that beset the artist may be included in one-the hardship of not getting work. Boccaccio says: "Fortune has a hundred eyes; only fools call her blind." As she had done in his boyhood, she fixed her eyes again on Greenough. Another friend was about to rise up at the moment of greatest need. James Fenimore Cooper arrived in Florence. He became acquainted with, and interested in the young American sculptor. Cooper had a large American heart. Perceiving the merit of Greenough, he held out to him a helping hand in the most helpful way. He ordered a group of him the Chanting Cherubs. When finished, he sent it to America to be exhibited. The effect he designed and expected was produced. The name of Horatio Green

ough became widely and honorably known in America. Mr. Cooper, following up his first noble discriminating act with a second, quickly took advantage of the fame gathered for his young friend by the Chanting Cherubs, to influence the Federal Government to order a statue of Washington. In the letter above quoted, Mr. Greenough thus speaks of Mr. Cooper:-"Fenimore Cooper saved me from despair after my return to Italy. He employed me as I wished to be employed; and up to this moment has been a father to me in kindness."

Greenough now threw his whole thought and soul into the Washington. With studious deliberation he matured the conception and composition. It was a bold originality in the young sculptor to present Washington naked to the American people. In doing so, he surrendered himself to his genial emotions and artistic convictions, which lifted him above prosaic demands. A high function of art is, to elevate without falsifying, to idealize without denaturalizing. This Greenough has done in his Washington of the Capitol. This noble colossal statue will grow on public esteem as time removes the original further from association with single events, and men shall more and more contemplate Washington in the majesty of his moral greatness; the which, while it was the source of his civil wisdom and supremacy, gave effect, too, to his military genius and leadership. The real Washington will then appear to be what he in truth is, identical with the grand ideal of Greenough. And when, a century hence, our cities and public edifices shall be beautified by hundreds of sculptured masterpieces, and the general taste shall have been cultivated by multiplication of the works of affluent native genius, the gaze of the mighty populous Republic will still be turned with admiration towards this simple, majestic figure; and the crowned masters of sculpture will look back with gratitude to him who had the genius and power to inaugurate their great art in America, by embodying in adequate grandeur the sublime Washing

ton.

Greenough was now prosperously and securely launched in his career. He, yet a young man, had high responsible work. An artist can ask no more. Hope took the place of despondency, an elevating selfconfidence of depressing misgivings. The artist had cause to be thankful. In 1837 occurred an event, which gave the man, too cause to be thankful, and for all the rest of his life. He was married in Florence, to Miss Louisa Gore, of Boston. Life was now to him full of joy. He was recog

nized at home and in Italy, as a sculptor of high and rising merit; blest as few are in his married life; relaxing days of congenial labor with evenings among selected companions, or cultivated and distinguished visitors to the Tuscan Capital; sought by his countrymen, many of whom have a cherished recollection of the easy, elegant hospitality of the Palazzo Baciocchi. A gentleman who, with his family, at a time of deep affliction, was indebted in Florence to Mr. and Mrs. Greenough for tender fraternal kindness, in a recent letter to the writer of this, alludes to Mr. Greenough's decease in these expressive and touching words:-"He was a true, high-spirited and independent man, and I feel in losing him, that something is permanently deducted from my life."

Mr. Greenough was simple in his wants, temperate in his indulgences. With a full appreciation of all healthful things, he would at any time have cheerfully given up a good dinner for a "good talk." And in a good talk he was sure to play one of the best parts. His conversation was brilliant. He had been a searching observer in several lands; had consorted with differing classes; had personally known many of the eminent men of Europe and America; and, with these advantages, he was bold in thought, and always aimed at the centre of men and things. He was an artist in the telling of a story. He was hospitable and sociable, and made and kept many friends. He was generous, and delicate in his generosity.

His intellectual capacity was large and various; his temperament nervous and excitable. Hence, he could not be content with one field. The genuine artist, being rich in sympathies, easily draws into himself the electric currents that are forever

playing around him. The varied aptitudes, bodily and mental, that manifested themselves so decisively in youth, had all ripened together in manhood. The poetic organization does not let natural gifts rust from disuse. Self-culture is one of its needs. It delights in a multiplex activity. The strong, lively boy grew into the robust, energetic man, whose noble height was graced by the sinews and muscles of an athlete; whose lungs and heart swelled a chest ample enough for a Hercules; and who delighted to buffet the waves on a rough beach, and to busy the arm that modelled a Venus, in an eager game at quoits. The boy's fondness for reading unfolded itself into the judgment of the critic, and the productiveness of the spirited original writer. The hand that sculptured grand and beautiful forms, could lay aside the chisel to take up the pen, and,

concentrating the genial conclusions of a thoughtful life, write therewith in a few hours a triumphant refutation of Burke's Theory of the Sublime and Beautiful.

That Mr. Greenough should give his mind to painting and architecture, and the fundamental principles of all Art, was, with his eager nature, a necessity. But he also found time for literary study. He was not only a thorough master of Italian, which he spoke like a native, but of French, which he likewise spoke correctly and fluently; and latterly, during a residence at Gräfenberg, he taught himself German. Moreover, he took a deep interest in politics, and sympathized strongly with the recent great popular movement in Europe. He was a cordial Democrat. His sojourn abroad, during his whole manhood, strengthened him in republicanism, converting youthful inherited impressions into virile convictions. After living so long in Italy, under the yoked tyrannies of Prince and Priest, he seemed here on American soil to revel in liberty. To his friends it was an enjoyment and also a profit, to see him, on his return home eighteen months since, throw himself with such ardor into the great questions and interests of the day. He discussed them with the vivacity and directness of one whose appetite had been sharpened by long abstinence.

It was however to topics and things whereon the light of Art shines or ought to shine, that he most often recurred. A walk with him in Broadway or the Fifth Avenue, was a lively dissertation on architecture. He sought to have every where the beauty of fitness. He wished all products of man, like those of Nature, to be children of the marriage between Beauty and Utility. He liked to go into foundries; and then on coming out he would make drawings of iron fences, or bedsteads, or stoves. He had an earnest purpose to spread throughout the land a knowledge of how practical beauty is. He wished to give his country the benefit of his poetic perception, and of his life of study on the general applicability of principles of beauty.

But these his lofty aims were not to be fulfilled. He was only permitted to point public attention to this high matter. He had just made a brilliant beginning by two lectures in Boston, when he was suddenly cut off. The nervous fibre of genius often snaps from the very fineness of its texture and its hypervitality. So it was with Horatio Greenough. By his death, his country has lost one of her most gifted sons. An accomplished, aspiring, noble-minded man has passed from our midst. The gap he has left will be

slow to close. They who had the privilege of his friendship, have, in their memory of him, a dear image that will live with them undimmed through their remaining years; and long after all the friends who will carry his memory to their graves, shall have joined him in that spirit-land where there are no struggles and no tears, will be visible the impress his genius has made upon his country.

As the appropriate conclusion to this insufficient record of his life and character, we append a catalogue of his works.

1. Mr. Greenough's first ideal work was a statue of Abel, modelled in Rome, in 1826, but never executed in marble.

2. Statue of Byron's Medora. For R. Gilmor, of Baltimore.

3. Group. The Chanting Cherubs. For J. Fenimore Cooper.

4. The Ascension of the Infant Spirit. A group of an Infant and Cherub.

5. Group. Portraits of two Children of David Sears, playing with a squirrel.

6. Statuette. The Genius of America. For J. Hoyt, of New-York.

7. Portrait Statue of Miss Grinnell, of New Bedford, (now Mrs. N. P. Willis.)

8. Portrait Statues of two Youths, sons of J. Thompson, of New-York.

9. Monument to Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs. For Miss Gibbs of Newport.

10. Statue of Washington, by order of Congress, for the Capitol.

The sum, twenty thousand dollars, voted by Congress, was intended to be an honest compensation for this work. The amount was the same as that paid by Massachusetts to Chantry for his statue of Washington, the size of life. Greenough, determined to spare neither time nor expense to make his work worthy of the country and himself, made it colossal (twice the size of life), involving an expense threefold beyond what it would have cost of the natural size.

The embellishments of the chair have a significance which often escape observation. The statuettes of Columbus, and an Indian Chief, supporting the arms of the chair, and the trident, have found favor as being so obviously illustrative of our country's history. But the bas-reliefs of the Rising Sun on Apollo's chariot on the one side, and the infant Hercules strangling the serpent on the other, are, by many, looked upon as mere "classical" embellishments, independent of the subject. Were they no more than this, they would be disfigurements instead of adornments. The artist originally designed to have inscribed two lines from an ode of

Virgil;-under the Apollo, Nunc nascitur lucidus ordo; and under the Hercules, Incipe, parve puer, cui non risere parentes. These verses would have interpreted the bas-reliefs. Greenough finally omitted them, because sculpture should speak its own language so distinctly as to need no aid from letters.

11. Child seated on a bank, intently gazing at a butterfly that has just lighted on the back of its hand. For a Hungarian nobleman.

12. Statuette of Venus Victrix. For John Lowell, and presented by him to the Boston Athenæum.

13. Colossal Group, for the Capitol, by order of Congress.

This work, which was finished in July, 1851, occupied the artist eight years, be sides a delay of four years occasioned by his not being able in all that time to obtain a block of Serravezza marble suitable to his purpose. It consists of four figures, a mother and child, an American Indian and the father. This group illustrates a phasis in the progress of American civilization, viz., the unavoidable conflict between the Anglo-Saxon and aboriginal savage races. The composition may be thus briefly described:-The mother has sunk in terror to the ground, clasping to her bosom the infant. Over her stands the savage, his tomahawk uplifted. Behind, the father, a stalwart pioneer, has just seized the Indian by both arms, with one knee planted on the hollow of his back. The firm grasp of the father satisfies the beholder that the savage is now powerless for harm. But words cannot adequately translate a sculptured composition. The huge mass of marble seems to writhe, awakening in the beholder conflicting emotions.

The figures of the mother and child were entirely remodelled in the years 1846 and '47.

14. Statue of the Angel Abdiel retiring from the assemblage of rebellious Angels; from Milton's Paradise Lost.

15. Monument to his friend Giusti, the Italian poet; erected at Pescia, Tuscany.

16. Bas-relief, representing an artist whose labors are suspended by the failure of the light by which he is working. He is seated in an attitude of pensive dejection, while a hand from a cloud supplies oil to the lamp.

This work, Mr. Greenough has been heard to say, was intended to record a fact in his personal history. At a time when he almost despaired of being able to pursue his studies in Italy, for want of funds, he received the loan of a large sum, without knowing whence it came. This bas-relief is a monument, as noble as it

is beautiful, at once to the generosity of his friends and to his own manly gratitude. It is now in the possession of George Ticknor, of Boston, to whom it was presented by Greenough, in recognition of the part which that gentleman had taken in the transaction.

17. Bas-relief of Castor and Pollux.

18. Greenough's last ideal work was a Venus, contending for the golden apple. It is of heroic size, that of the Venus of Milo. This statue was much admired in Florence, and Browning, the English poet, urged Mr. Greenough to send it to the World's Fair, in London.

It was modelled entirely in plaster of Paris (as was also the second group of the mother and child) by a new process. "The merit of this invention seems to be shared between Greenough and Powers. They commenced about the same time to make trials in this material, and by interchange of experiences and views the method was perfected. The gain to artists by this invention is two-fold; plaster of Paris does not expand like clay, and there is no need of the precarious and expensive process of casting."

Besides the above enumerated statues and bas-relief, he executed a large number of busts; among these were portraits of John Adams and of John Q. Adams, Henry Clay, Mrs. R. Gilmor, Josiah Quincy, Sen., S. Appleton, Jonathan Mason, Thos. Cole, the late celebrated landscape-painter, N. P. Willis, the Marquess Gino Capponi, for many years a personal friend of Greenough, and latterly Prime Minister of Tuscany. His last bust was one of his friend, J. Fenimore Cooper. This he executed last summer in Brooklyn.

In giving a list of Greenough's works, it should be recorded here, that he is virtually the architect of the Bunker Hill Monument. While he was a student in Cambridge, a prize was offered by the Bunker Hill Association for the best design of a monument. The judges were Washington Allston, Gilbert Stewart, and Warren Dutten. There were many competitors, and they awarded the prize to Horatio Greenough. The project of erecting a monument was not carried into effect at that time; but when some years later it was resumed, his plan was in the essentials adopted.

Mr. Greenough was wont to speak of himself as a sculptor of few works; but the above list proves with what zeal and industry he devoted himself to his Art, that he could effect so much in the term of twenty-seven years.

Most of his works were executed at extremely low prices. For many years

his charge for busts was only from one to two hundred dollars, which is about half of what is charged by Sculptors of the present day, and of what he himself received for his late busts.

The two large works for the Capitol at Washington, cost the Government, the one $20,000, the other $21,000.

On

these, to which he gave his best energies during many years, he expended more money than he received. When his friends complained of this, he would say, that a money-making artist could never be a great one; and that having been honored by his countrymen with national works, he would do his best for them.

Sune maison publique ii au rate

we were compelled to inquire: Ya-t'il

should have said perhaps, for they seemed never to have heard of the other,) and they answered at length that there was no tavern, unless we could get lodgings at the mill, le moulin, which we had passed; or they would direct us to a grocery, and almost every house had a small grocery at one end of it. We called on the public notary or village lawyer, but he had no more beds nor English than the rest. At one house, there was so good a misunderstanding at once established through the politeness of all parties, that we were encouraged to walk in and sit down, and ask for a glass of water; and having drank their water, we thought it was as good as to have tasted their salt. When our host and his wife spoke of their poor accommodations, meaning for themselves, we assured them that they were good enough, for we thought that they were only apologizing for the poorness of the accommodations they were about to offer us, and we did not discover our mistake till they took us up a ladder into a loft, and showed to our eyes what they had been laboring in vain to communicate to our brains through our ears, that they had but that one apartment with its few beds for the whole family. We made our a-dieus forthwith, and with gravity, perceiving the literal signification of that word. We were finally taken in at a sort of public-house, whose master worked for Patterson, the proprietor of the extensive saw-mills driven by a portion of the Montmorenci stolen from the fall, whose roar we now heard. We here talked, or murdered French all the evening, with the master of the house and his family, and probably had a more amusing time than if we had completely understood one another. At length they showed us to a bed in their best chamber, very high to get into, with a low wooden rail to it. It had no cotton sheets, but coarse homeVOL. I.-21

After

made, dark colored linen ones. ward, we had to do with sheets still coarser than these, and nearly the color of our blankets. There was a large open buffet loaded with crockery, in one corner of the room, as if to display their wealth to travellers, and pictures of scripture scenes, French, Italian, and Spanish, hung around. Our hostess came back directly to inquire if we would have brandy for breakfast. The next morning, when I asked their names, she took down the temperance pledges of herself and husband, and children, which were hanging against the wall. They were Jean Baptiste Binet, and his wife, Geneviève Binet. Jean Baptiste is the sobriquet of the French Canadians.

After breakfast we proceeded to the fall, which was within half a mile, and at this distance its rustling sound, like the wind among the leaves, filled all the air. We were disappointed to find that we were in some measure shut out from the west side of the fall by the private grounds and fences of Patterson, who appropriates not only a part of the water for his mill, but a still larger part of the prospect, so that we were obliged to trespass. This gentleman's mansion-house and grounds were formerly occupied by the Duke of Kent, father to Queen Victoria. It appeared to me in bad taste for an individual, though he were the father of Queen Victoria, to obtrude himself with his land titles, or at least his fences, on so remarkable a natural phenomenon, which should, in every sense, belong to mankind. Some falls should even be kept sacred from the intrusion of mills and factories, as waterprivileges in another than the millwright's sense. This small river falls perpendicularly nearly two hundred and fifty feet at one pitch. The St. Lawrence falls only 164 feet at Niagara. It is a very simple and noble fall, and leaves nothing to be desired; but the most that I could say of it would only have the force of one other