Hosmer ished marble copy disappointing, with "not one grateful touch, not one suggestion of half-tone and tenderness of chiselling—nothing but ridges and grooves" (Taft, post, p. 208). Called home in 1860 by the illness of her fa- ther, she received from the state of Missouri an order for a colossal bronze statue of Thomas H. Benton, a work placed eight years later in La- fayette Park, St. Louis. From a distance, the statue has "the dignity of great bulk," but it lacks vitality; the sculptor, a confirmed pseudo- classicist, swathed her subject in a pseudo-toga. Her monumental creations were not always suc- cessful: her invited competitive design for the national Lincoln monument at Springfield, 111., was rejected in favor of Larkin Mead's (1867), and more then twenty years later her ambitious project for the "Crerar" Lincoln at Chicago was declined. She was happier in such inventions as her "Siren Fountain" for Lady Marian Alford (1861), her chimney-piece, "Death of the Dry- ads," for Lady Ashburton's drawing-room at Melchet Court, and her marble reclining figures, the "Sleeping Faun" and the "Waking Faun." In the Dublin exhibition of 1865, the "Sleeping Faun" so pleased Sir Benjamin Guinness that he offered a thousand guineas for it. Learning that it was not for sale, as the artist wished to show it in the United States, he doubled his offer; whereupon Miss Hosmer, original as ever, sold it to him at his first price. Her artistic pursuits ranged from close supervision of marble carving in Rome to the study of a drowned girl in the Paris Morgue. Her summer vacations, combin- ing business with pleasure, were spent in the British Isles, where she passed from castle to castle; from Ashby to Raby, from Ashridge to Melchet Court. In 1869 she began her full- length statue of the former Queen of Naples, cos- tumed as she was at the battle of Gaeta, a two- years' work pursued with romantic fervor, and resulting in a friendship with the Queen and with her sister, the Empress of Austria. In the latter part of her life she gave herself largely to the problem of perpetual motion, at first in England and later in America. She went West, too, and there spoke on art to enthusiastic audiences. She was the most famous woman sculptor of her day. Her many decorations from European royalties she regarded as "souvenirs of friends rather than as decorations." John Gibson said that she had "a passionate vocation for sculpture." She had also a genius for friendship and an unquenchable zest for enhancing life through many kinds of intellectual and physical effort. [Harriet Hosmer: Letters and Memories (19*2)* e