Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/443

Rh he even then showed his peculiar genius. Some of the affluent men of the city took charge of the promising boy, and furnished him with the means of studying and of travelling. Foremost among these was Mr. Longworth, and to him Powers sent, as a token of gratitude, his first original creation in marble. I say creation, because there is nothing in this work which speaks of labour. It is a figure so complete, so living and beautiful, that it is—not to be described. It is the bust of a woman the size of life. They have called it Genevra, but why I know not. It ought to be called Galathea, because Pygmalion Powers has infused into her a vitality which requires only a divine intimation to breathe; or rather it ought to be called the American, because the peculiar beauty of the features, the form and action of the head and neck, are those of the American woman. There is none of the Greek stiffness in it; there is a regularity of beauty full of life and grace, and the expression—yes, thus ought she to look, the woman of the New World, she who, sustained by a public spirit full of benevolence, may, without struggle and without protest, develop the fulness and the earnestness of her being: thus ought she to smile, to glance, to move, reposing in this as in a world of truth, goodness, and beauty; thus ought she to be firm, and yet pleasing; thus divinely wise; thus angelically harmonious and kind; thus ought she to work! And then, then, shall arise the new day of the New World.

Mr. Longworth had jocularly prepared me, before he conducted me into his cabinet of art, where his bust stands, “for the rudeness of the first work of a young artist,” and requested me to overlook this. I gazed at the figure, and contemplated it till my heart swelled with emotion, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I wept before the ideal of the new beauty, not because I was myself so far removed from it; no, but in admiration, in joy, in hope, in the consciousness that I here beheld that