l life. Mr. Simmons is
the idealist who translates his vision into the actuality of the hour
and who also exalts this actuality of the hour to the universality of
the vision. In the creation of portrait busts and of the statues and
monumental memorials of great men he infuses into them the indefinable
quality of extended relation which relegates his work to the realm of
the universal and, therefore, to the immortality of art, rather than
restricting it to the temporal locality. Louis Gorse observes that it is
not the absence of faults that constitutes a masterpiece, but that it is
flame, it is life, it is emotion, it is sincerity. Under the touch of
Mr. Simmons the personal accent speaks; to his creative power flame and
life respond, and to no sculptor is the truth so admirably stated by M.
Gorse more applicable.

Mr. Simmons has been singularly fortunate in a wide American
recognition, having received a liberal share of the more important
commissions for great public works of sculpture. The splendid statue,
_al fresco_, of the poet Longfellow for his native city, Portland, was
appropriately the work of Mr. Simmons as a native of the same state; the
portrait statues of General Grant, Gov. William King, Roger Williams,
and Francis H. Pierrepont, all in Statuary Hall in the Capitol in
Washington; the portrait busts of Grant, Sheridan, Porter, Hooker,
Thomas, and other heroes of the Civil War; the colossal group of the
Naval Monument at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington,--are
all among the works of Mr. Simmons.

Like all artists who, like the poet, are born and not made, Mr. Simmons
gave evidence of his artistic bent in his early childhood. After
graduating from Bates College he modelled a bust of its president, and a
little later, going to Washington (in the winter of 1865-66), many of
the noted men of the time gave him sittings, and in a series of portrait
busts his genius impressed itself by its dignity of conception and an
unusual power of sympathetic interpretation. He modelled the bust of
Grant while he was the General's guest in camp, taking advantage of
whatever spare minutes General Grant could give for sittings in the
midst of his pressing responsibilities; and it is perhaps due to this
unusually intimate intercourse with the great hero, and the _rapport_,
not difficult of establishment, between two men whose natures were akin
in a certain noble sincerity and lofty devotion to the purest ideals,
tha