Beacon
Hill Boston for its impassioned devotion to the "attenuated outlines" of
Flaxman's art. But the work of Story will survive all transient
variations of opinion, even of the present realistic age; for is not
true realism, after all, to be found in the eternal ideals of truth,
grace, dignity, refinement, significance, and beauty? These qualities
have a message to convey; and no one can study with sympathetic
appreciation any sculpture of William Wetmore Story without feeling that
the work has something to say; that it is not a mere reproduction of
some form, but is, rather, an idea impersonated, and therefore it has
life, it has significance. The criticism of the immediate hour is not
necessarily infallible because it is contemporary. What does William
Watson say?

"A deft musician does the breeze become
Whenever an AEolian harp it finds;
Hornpipe and hurdy-gurdy both are dumb
Unto the most musicianly of winds."

It is an irretrievable loss if, in the passion for the _vita nuova_, a
generation, or a century, shall substitute for the AEolian harp the mere
hornpipe and hurdy-gurdy of the hour. In another of his keenly critical
quatrains William Watson embodies this signal truth:--

"His rhymes the poet flings at all men's feet,
And whoso will may trample on his rhymes.
Should Time let die a song that's pure and sweet,
The singer's loss were more than matched by Time's."

Art is progressive, and the present is always the "heir of all the ages"
preceding; but it cannot be affirmed that it invariably makes the best
use of its rich inheritance.

There are latter-day sculptors who excel in certain excellences that
Story lacked; still, it would not be his loss, but our own, if we fail
in a due recognition of that in his art which may appeal to the
imagination; for, whatever the enthusiasms of other cults may be, there
are qualities of beauty, strength, and profound significance in the art
of Story that must insure their permanent recognition. Still, it remains
true that Mr. Story owes his fame in an incalculable degree to the
friendly pens of Hawthorne and others of his immediate circle,--Lowell,
Motley, Charles Eliot Norton, Thackeray, Browning,--friends who,
according to the latest standards of art criticism, were not unqualified
nor absolute judges of art, but who were in sympathy with ideal
expression and recognized this as embodied in the statues of Story.

Browning wro