But if Saint-Gaudens’s imagination was thus capable of raising the portrait to the dignity of the type, it was no less capable of endowing the imagined type with all the individuality of the portrait.  In the “Deacon Chapin” (Pl. 29), of Springfield, we have a purely ideal production, the finest embodiment of New England Puritanism in our art, for no portrait of the real Chapin existed.  This swift-striding, stern-looking old man, who clasps his Bible as Moses clasped the tables of the law and grips his peaceful walking-stick as though it were a sword, is a Puritan of the Puritans; but he is an individual also—­a rough-hewn piece of humanity with plenty of the old Adam about him—­an individual so clearly seen and so vigorously characterized that one can hardly believe the statue an invention or realize that no such old Puritan deacon ever existed in the flesh.  Something of this imaginative quality there is in almost everything Saint-Gaudens touched, even in his purely decorative figures.  His angels and caryatides are not classical goddesses but modern women, lovely, but with a personal and particular loveliness, not insisted upon but delicately suggested.  And it is not the personality of the model who chanced to pose for them but an invented personality, the expression of the nobility, the sweetness, and the pure-mindedness of their creator.  And in such a figure as that of the “Adams Memorial” (Pl. 30), in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, his imaginative power reaches to a degree of impressiveness almost unequalled in modern art.  One knows of nothing since the tombs of the Medici that fills one with the same hushed awe as this shrouded, hooded, deeply brooding figure, rigid with contemplation, still with an eternal stillness, her soul rapt from her body on some distant quest.  Is she Nirvana?  Is she The Peace of God?  She has been given many names—­her maker would give her none.  Her meaning is mystery; she is the everlasting enigma.

[Illustration:  Copyright, De W.C.  Ward.  Plate 28.—­Saint-Gaudens.  “Lincoln.”]

Not the greatest artist could twice sound so deep a note as this.  The figure remains unique in the work of the sculptor as it is unique in the art of the century.  Yet, perhaps, Saint-Gaudens’s greatest works are two in which all the varied elements of his genius find simultaneous expression; into which his mastery of composition, his breadth and solidity of structure, his technical skill, his insight into character, and his power of imagination enter in nearly equal measure:  the “Shaw Memorial” and the great equestrian group of the “Sherman Monument.”