, and one in
which is portrayed the artist's spiritual insight and susceptibility to
poetic exaltation. To one visitor to Mr. Simmons's studio this statue
suggested the following lines:--

Fair on her sight it gleams,--the Promised Land!
The rose of dawn sifts through the azure air,
And all her weariness and toil and care
Vanish, as if from her some tender hand
Lifted the burden, and transformed the hour
To this undreamed-of sense of joy and power!
The rapture and the ecstasy divine
Are deep realities that only wait
Their hour to dawn, nor ever rise too late
To draw the soul to its immortal shrine.

O Sculptor! thy great gift has shaped this clay,
To image the profoundest truth, and stand
As witness of the spirit power that may
Achieve the vision of the Promised Land!

[Illustration: "VALLEY FORGE"
Franklin Simmons
_Page 110_]

In a statuette in bronze called "Valley Forge," Mr. Simmons has fairly
incarnated the entire spirit of the Revolutionary period in that
mysterious way recognized only in its result; all that unparalleled
epoch of tragic intensity and sublime triumph lives again in this work.
The fidelity to a lofty ideal which essentially characterizes Mr.
Simmons is as unswerving as that of Merlin, who followed "The Gleam."

"Great the Master
And sweet the Magic
When over the valley
In early summers,
Over the mountain,
On human faces,
And all around me
Moving to melody,
Floated the Gleam."

This American sculptor who, in his early youth, sought the artistic
atmosphere of Rome as the environment most stimulating to his dawning
power, who accepted with unfailing courage the incidental privations of
art life in a foreign land more renowned for beauty than for comfort,
who

"... never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,"

has expressed his message in many purely ideal works,--the message that
the true artist must always give to the world and that leads humanity to
the crowning truth of life, that of the ceaseless progress of the soul
in its immortality.

For the brief and significant assertion of the apostle condenses the
most profound truth of life when he says:--

"To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is
life and peace."

In these words are imaged the supreme purpo