byl." Both the "Cleopatra" and the
"Sibyl" became famous. Whether they would produce so strong an effect at
the present stage of twentieth-century life is a problem, but one that
need not press for solution. Mr. Story was singularly fortunate in
certain conditions that grouped themselves about his life and combined
to establish his fame. These conditions, of course, were largely the
outer reflection of inner qualities, as our conditions are apt to be;
still, the "lack of favoring gales" not infrequently foredooms some
gallant bark to a disastrous course.

"Man is his own star....

* * * * *

Our acts, our angels, are, for good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still,"

it is true; yet has not Edith Thomas embodied something of that
overruling destiny that every thoughtful observer must discern in life
in these lines?--

"You may blame the wind or no,
But it ever hath been so--
Something bravest of its kind
Leads a frustrate life and blind,
For the lack of favoring gales
Blowing blithe on other sails."

Only occasionally have we

"... the time, and the place,
And the loved one all together."

Mr. Story's nature was eminently sympathetic with the other arts; he was
himself almost as much a literary man as he was a sculptor; he was the
friend and companion of literary men, and to the fact that art in the
middle years of the nineteenth century was far more a literary topic
than a matter of critical scrutiny, Mr. Story owed an incalculable
degree of his fame. He was an extremely interesting figure with his
social grace, his liberal culture, and his versatile gifts. His life was
centred in choice and refined associations. If not dowered with lofty
and immortal original genius, he had a singular combination of talent,
of fastidious taste, and of the intellectual appreciation that enabled
him to select interesting ideal subjects to portray in the plastic art.
These appealed to the special interest of his literary friends and were
widely discussed in the press and periodicals of the day. It is a
_bonmot_ of contemporary studio life that Hawthorne rather than Story
created the "Cleopatra," and one ingenious spirit suggests that as Mr.
Story put nothing of expression or significance into his statues, the
beholder could read into them anything he pleased; finding an empty
mould, so to speak, into which to pour whatever image or embod