“If she heard that in the sacristy of a certain cathedral, hundreds of miles away, were lying robes of Eastern queens, she mounted her horse and rode to the spot, for the sake of learning the lesson they could teach.

“Day after day alone in her studio, she studied the subject.  Think what knowledge of the country, of the history of the people, must be gathered, must be moulded, to bring into the face and bearing of its queen the expression of the race!  Think what familiar acquaintance with the human form, to represent a lifelike figure at all!

“For years after I came home I read the newspapers to see if I could find any notice of the statue of Zenobia; and I did at length see this announcement:  ’The statue of Zenobia, by Miss Hosmer, is on exhibition at Childs & Jenks’.’

“It was after five years.  All through those five years, Miss Hosmer had kept her projects steadily turned in this direction.

“Whatever may be the criticism of art upon her work, no one can deny that she is above the average artist.

“But she is herself, as a woman, very much above herself in art.  If there came to any struggling artist in Rome the need of a friend,—­and of the thousand artists in Rome very few are successful,—­Harriet Hosmer was that friend.

“I knew her to stretch out a helping hand to an unfortunate artist, a poor, uneducated, unattractive American, against whom the other Americans in Rome shut their houses and their hearts.  When the other Americans turned from the unsuccessful artist, Harriet Hosmer reached forth the helping hand.

“When Harriet Hosmer knew herself to be a sculptor, she knew also that in all America was no school for her.  She must leave home, she must live where art could live.  She might model her busts in the clay of her own soil, but who should follow out in marble the delicate thought which the clay expressed?  The workmen of Massachusetts tended the looms, built the railroads, and read the newspapers.  The hard-handed men of Italy worked in marble from the designs put before them; one copied the leaves which the sculptor threw into the wreaths around the brows of his heroes; another turned with his tool the folds of the drapery; another wrought up the delicate tissues of the flesh; none of them dreamed of ideas:  they were copyists,—­the very hand-work that her head needed.

“And to Italy she went.  For her school she sought the studio of Gibson—­the greatest sculptor of the time.

“She resolved ‘To scorn delights and live laborious days;’ and there she has lived and worked for years.

“She fashions the clay to her ideal—­every little touch of her fingers in the clay is a thought; she thinks in clay.

“The model finished and cast in the dull, hard, inexpressive plaster, she stands by the workmen while they put it into the marble.  She must watch them, for a touch of the tool in the wrong place might alter the whole expression of the face, as a wrong accent in the reader will spoil a line of poetry.