eschews, feeling himself one of the
people, and laboring for their elevation.

Neither does he deem it any part of genius to neglect his family, forget
to pay his butcher's bill, and ignore the claim of his tailor. His ample
house and neat atelier, at the north end of Eagle street, in the city of
Albany, are the fruit of his patient and inspiring toil--his chisel has
won him moderate fortune as well as world-wide fame.

Photographs of the 'Palmer Marbles' are seen in the show windows of
Paris, London, and Berlin, while in this country they help to fill the
portfolios of the _virtuoso_, adorning the walls of the parlor and the
private gallery.

Though in youth Palmer did not receive an average common-school
education, he converses like a man of liberal culture, showing that he
belongs to the class of self-made men.

He has never visited the interminable art palaces of Europe, nor
studied, in the sense in which that term is used, the 'old masters;'
still he has appropriated all the valuable hints to be obtained from the
classic models, without regarding them as the _ne plus ultra_ of
artistic execution, and therefore to be only imitated, to the exclusion
of the higher ideals of an advanced civilization.

He has an intelligible and correct theory in regard to the fidelity of
art to nature. For instance, he insists that he should _represent_, not
imitate; and in making a bust of a man, the sculptor should express the
higher moods of his subject, and show him with his better qualities
brought to the surface. So the forms of nature should be idealized in
the direction of their primitive tendency, and thus art help to express
that ineffable longing of the soul, that reaching upward for a
perfection that is approximated on earth, but never attained. This
idealization is like the humor of Dickens, something more than nature in
its grotesqueness, yet a stimulated growth of the natural quality.
Palmer always takes nature for his model, and then assimilates it to
that ideal beauty which dwells in his imagination and sheds a spiritual
halo over the creation of his chisel.

Like every true disciple of genius, he feels that he has a mission to
perform, and that he is responsible for the influence he exerts on the
tastes and aesthetic culture of the people. As you chat with him in his
studio, dressed in his blouse and cap, his dark eye glowing with
enthusiasm for his art, or sparkling with playful humor, standing before
you tall