Hosmer

Like his friend, William Channing Gannett
[#.#.], with whom he was closely associated, he
was both a radical liberal and a mystic; a thinker
and a poet. As the latter he enriched private
devotion and public worship. Of his numerous
hymns some have come into general use both in
this country and abroad. The latest Unitarian
hymnal contains more than thirty. With Gan-
nett he published The Thought of God in Hymns
and Poems (three series, 1885,1904, and 1918).
He also prepared The Way of Life (1877), a
service book for Sunday schools, and edited, in
collaboration with Gannett and J. Vila Blake,
Unity Hymns and Carols (1880), and with the
former a much enlarged edition of the same in
1911. In the spring of 1908 he gave a series of
ten lectures in church hymnody at the Harvard
Divinity School.

[G. L. Hosmer, Hosmer Geneal. (1928) ; Who's Who
in America, 1928-29; Class Report, Class of Sixty-two,
Harvard Univ., Fiftieth Anniversary (1912); Chris-
tian Register, June 27, July 25, Aug. i, 1929; E. S.
Ninde, The Story of the American Hymn (1921); G.
W, Cooke, Unitananism in America (1902),]

H.E.S.

HOSMER, HARRIET GOODHUE (Oct.

9, i830-Feb. 21, 1908), sculptor, was born in
Watertown, Mass., the second child of Hiram
and Sarah (Grant) Hosmer and a descendant of
James Hosmer, an early emigrant from Hawk-
hurst, Kent, England. When Harriet was four,
her mother died of tuberculosis. Her father, a
physician, having lost three children, gave his
one remaining child an outdoor life. She had
horse, dog, gun, boat, and liberty; she rowed,
raced, climbed, and hunted; she studied birds
and stuffed them, and made images in clay. She
grew up hardy and likable, but she was often a
pest to the neighbors and a terror to her teachers.
In her sixteenth year she was sent to Lenox to
be taught by Mrs. Sedgwick, whose methods
proved successful. Lenox was a cultural center,
where notable persons met; Fanny Kemble was
a resident, Emerson a visitor. The little Water-
town tomboy became a favorite. After three
years at Lenox she studied drawing and model-
ing in Boston, then, in order to study anatomy
in a school to which women were admitted, she
attended the medical department of St. Louis
University. In St Louis she lived in the home
of a Lenox schoolmate, whose father, Wayland
Crow, became interested in her art and gave her
her first commission for a life-size marble
statue. Finishing her studies, she took a steam-
boat trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans
and up again as far as the Falls of St. Anthony.
She smoked a peace-pipe with the Indians and
on a wager climbed a bluff since known as Mt
Hosmer. Once more in her Watertown home,

Hosmer

she modeled an ideal bust, "Hesper," and prac-
tised marble-cutting. She formed a lasting friend-
ship with Charlotte Cushman, later her com-
panion in Rome. In 1852 she went to Rome, and
for seven years she studied under the Eng-
lish sculptor John Gibson, with the advantage,
shrewdly noted by Hawthorne, of showing her
works in one of the Gibson studios. Her first
productions were a pair of ideal busts, "Daphne"
and "Medusa"; her first life-size marble statue
the "GEnone," placed in the St. Louis Museum.
Fanny Kemble's prophecy to Crow that "Hatty's
peculiarities will stand in the way of her success
with people of society and the world" proved
untrue. The "peculiarities" were an asset. Gib-
son's only pupil, she won favor as a piquant per-
sonage, a true artist, yet a good sport, too, not
afraid to gallop alone at twilight across the Cam-
pagna! Small, quick, and frank, the Yankee girl
had character as well as charm. "A great pet of
mine and of Robert's," wrote Elizabeth Brown-
ing (F. G. Kenyon, Letters of Elisabeth Barrett
Browning, 1898, II, 166).

In 1854 Miss Hosmer received through Crow
the order for her second marble statue, the "Bea-
trice Cenci" for the St. Louis Mercantile Li-
brary. The work proved to be one of her best.
The figure is shown lying asleep, one hand under
her head, the other holding a rosary. In spite of
details too emphatically carved, the work has
merit. "The conception, and in the main the
execution, could hardly have been surpassed in
the Roman colony of the fifties" (Taft, post, p.
205). In contrast with this tragic figure were
her next works, "Puck" and "Will-o'-the-Wisp."
The former was a bat-winged elf astride a mush-
room, a beetle in one hand, a lizard in the other,
and mycologic specimens all about. The Prince
of Wales, afterward Edward VII, bought a copy
and so increased its popularity that thirty rep-
licas were made, it is said, at a thousand dollars
each.

After a brief visit to America in 1857, Miss
Hosmer devoted herself to a recumbent memorial
figure of the daughter of Madame Falconet, an
English Catholic resident in Rome. The monu-
ment was placed in the church of S. Andrea delle
Fratte in 1858. Meanwhile her best-known pro-
duction, the marble statue of Zenobia, captive
queen of Palmyra, was well advanced. It was
shown at the London exhibition of 1862, where
it was favorably placed in the fourth niche of a
little temple in the center of a gallery, the other
three niches being given to tinted statues by
Gibson. Hawthorne, seeing the unfinished model
in day, found it full of beauty and life—"a high,
heroic ode." Taft, at a later day, found the fin-

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