o cut wonderful heads of
dogs, horses, and lions, for scarf pins. He made hundreds of lions'
heads, and twenty years later, when he was helping his brother model the
lion figures for the Boston Public Library, his hands fairly flew, he
knew all the lines so well.
When Augustus went in the evenings to the drawing classes at Cooper
Union, he began drawing human figures and was so eager about his art
that he would have forgotten to eat or sleep if his mother had not
watched him. As he grew older, he loved art more and more. The only
thing else that attracted his eye was the city-full of soldiers, at the
beginning of the Civil War. He read the bulletin boards, heard groups of
men telling about battles, and his heart ached with love for America. He
wanted to go to war to show that love. But his father was now sure that
Augustus was a genius and insisted upon his going to Europe to study.
The father could not give him much money, hardly more than enough to get
him across the ocean, but he could cut cameos to pay for his lessons.
Augustus stayed in Paris a year. He made friends among the artists just
as he had made them when a child in New York. Then he worked four years
in Rome. He had a hard time there and grew thin for want of food and
sleep, but he was as eager as ever and worked faster and harder than
before. People began to visit his studio and always went away full of
praise for the talented young man. Rich Americans visiting in Rome urged
him to return to this country. They gave him orders, and he finally came
back to America, where he was kept busy on busts and medallions until he
began to have orders for monuments of great Americans. This was work he
liked. He loved America, and he was proud of her heroes. Perhaps he
loved Abraham Lincoln best of all. He had seen Lincoln a good many
times, and he had read and studied about his beautiful life until every
line of that man's face and figure was clear in his mind. Still, when he
was asked to make a statue of Lincoln for the city of Chicago, he worked
on it many years. On his statue of General Sherman which stands in
Central Park, New York, he labored eleven years. On the beautiful Robert
Gould Shaw monument which stands in front of the State House in Boston,
he spent twelve years. This does not mean that he stood with clay in his
hands all this time, but that from the time he began to plan what he
would draw into the statue, what size it ought to be, and whether the
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