e entered college at the
age of sixteen, devoting all his spare time to reading works of art, to
drawing and modelling, and the study of anatomy. He had also the good
fortune to meet and win the friendship of Washington Allston, who
advised him as to plans of study.

Immediately upon graduation, he sailed for Italy, which was, sadly
enough, to be the Mecca of American sculptors for many years to come.
For Italian sculpture was bound hand and foot by the traditions of
classicism, to which our early sculptors soon fell captive. Greenough
was no exception, and some years of study in the Italian studios
rivetted the chains.

His first commission was given him by J. Fenimore Cooper. It was a group
called the "Chanting Cherubs," and when it was sent home for exhibition,
it awakened a tempest of the first magnitude. Puritan ideas were
outraged at sight of the little naked bodies, the group was declared
indecent, and the bitter controversy was not stilled until it was
withdrawn from view. Greenough wrote of Cooper, "he saved me from
despair; he employed me as I wished to be employed; and has, up to this
moment, been a father to me in kindness"--a singularly interesting
addition to the portrait of the great novelist, famous for his enmities
rather than for his friendships.

The tragedy of Greenough's life was the fate of his great statue of
Washington, of which we have already spoken. He conceived the work on a
high plane, "as a majestic, god-like figure, enthroned beneath the dome
of the Capitol at Washington, gilded by the filtered rays of the
far-falling sunlight." Perhaps it was too high, but on its execution
Greenough labored faithfully for eight years. "It is the birth of my
thought," he wrote. "I have sacrificed to it the flower of my days, and
the freshness of my strength; its every lineament has been moistened by
the sweat of my toil and the tears of my exile. I would not barter away
its association with my name for the proudest fortune that avarice ever
dreamed."

It will be seen from the above that Greenough's epistolary style was
florid and grandiose in the extreme, but no doubt there was a foundation
of sincerity beneath it. A bitter disappointment awaited him. The
ponderous figure reached Washington safely in 1843, and was conveyed to
the Capitol, where, beneath the rotunda, its predestined pedestal
awaited it. But the statue was found too large to pass the door, and
when the door was widened and the great sto