Not long ago I visited the studio of Miss Hosmer in the Via Margutta, at Rome, and saw her numerous works, many of them still unfinished.  Here an arm seemed just reaching out from the rough block of marble; here a sweet face seemed like Pygmalion’s statue, coming into life.  In the centre of the studio was the “Siren Fountain,” executed for Lady Marion Alford.  A siren sits in the upper basin and sings to the music of her lute.  Three little cupids sit on dolphins, and listen to her music.

For some years Miss Hosmer has been preparing a golden gateway for an art gallery at Ashridge Hall, England, ordered by Earl Brownlow.  These gates, seventeen feet high, are covered with bas-reliefs representing the Air, Earth, and Sea.  The twelve hours of the night show “Aeolus subduing the Winds,” the “Descent of the Zephyrs,” “Iris descending with the Dew,” “Night rising with the Stars,” “The Rising Moon,” “The Hour’s Sleep,” “The Dreams Descend,” “The Falling Star,” “Phosphor and Hesper,” “The Hours Wake,” “Aurora Veils the Stars,” and “Morning.”  More than eighty figures are in the nineteen bas-reliefs.  Miss Hosmer has done other important works, among them a statue of the beautiful Queen of Naples, who was a frequent visitor to the artist’s studio, and several well-known monuments.  With her girlish fondness for machinery, she has given much thought to mechanics in these later years, striving to find, like many another, the secret of producing perpetual motion.  She spends much of her time now in England.  She is still passionately fond of riding, the Empress of Austria, who owns more horses than any woman in the world, declaring “that there was nothing she looked forward to with more interest in Rome, than to see Miss Hosmer ride.”

Many of the closing years of the sculptor’s long life were spent in Rome, where she had a wide circle of eminent American and English friends, among whom were Hawthorne, Thackeray, George Eliot, and the Brownings.  She made several discoveries in her work, one of which was a process of hardening limestone so that it resembled marble.  She also wrote both prose and poetry, and would have been successful as an author, if she had not given the bulk of her time to her beloved sculpture.

After her long sojourn in Rome she spent several years in England, executing important commissions, and then turned her face toward America.  In Watertown, where she was born, she again made her home; and here she breathed her last, February 21, 1908, after an illness of three weeks.  She was in her seventy-eighth year.  By her long life of earnest work and self-reliant purpose, coupled with her high gift, she has made for herself an abiding place in the history of art.

MADAME DE STAEL.

[Illustration:  MADAME DE STAEL.

From the painting by Mlle. Godefroy.]

It was the twentieth of September, 1881.  The sun shone out mild and beautiful upon Lake Geneva, as we sailed up to Coppet.  The banks were dotted with lovely homes, half hidden by the foliage, while brilliant flower-beds came close to the water’s edge.  Snow-covered Mont Blanc looked down upon the restful scene, which seemed as charming as anything in Europe.