sistants while himself so weak that he had to be carried
from the house to the studio. The end came on the evening of August 3,
1907. He died as he had lived, a member of no church, but a man of pure
and lofty character. As he had wished, his body was cremated, and his
ashes were temporarily deposited in the cemetery at Windsor, Vt., across
the river from his home. An informal funeral service was held in his
private studio on August 7, attended by friends and neighbors and by a
few old friends from a distance; but the gathering could include but a
few of the many who felt his death as a personal loss.

The merits of Saint-Gaudens's work were fully recognized in his
lifetime. He was an officer of the Legion of Honor, a Corresponding
Member of the Institute of France, a member of half a dozen academies,
and the bearer of honorary degrees from the universities of Harvard,
Yale, and Princeton. But of all the honors he received there were two,
one of a public, the other of a private nature, which he himself valued
most highly: the one as showing the estimation in which his art was held
by his fellow artists, the other as an evidence of the personal
affection felt for him by his friends. At the Pan-American Exposition in
1901, upon the unanimous recommendation of the Jury of Fine Arts,
composed of painters, sculptors, and architects, he was awarded a
special diploma and medal of honor, "apart from and above all other
awards," an entirely exceptional honor, which marked him as the first of
American artists, as previously received honors had marked him one of
the greatest sculptors of his time. On June 23, 1905, the artistic and
literary colony which had gradually grown up about his home in Cornish
celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his coming there by a fete and
open-air masque held in the groves of Aspet. The beauty of this
spectacle has become almost legendary. The altar with its columned
canopy, which served for a background to the play, still stands, or
recently stood, though much dilapidated by weather, as it was
immortalized by the sculptor himself in a commemorative plaquette (Pl.
23) which is among the most charming of his minor works. He planned if
he had lived to perpetuate it in enduring marble, and this task has now
been taken up by his wife, who means to dedicate the monument as a
fitting memorial to a great artist and a noble man in the place he loved
as his chosen home.

Some part of the vivid and lovable