sculpture may be counted, as we may count the few poets among men.
Michael Angelo, Michel Columb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles,
Polycletes, Puget, Canova, Albert Durer, are the brothers of Milton,
Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso, Homer, and Moliere. And such an
achievement is so stupendous that a single statue is enough to make a
man immortal, as Figaro, Lovelace, and Manon Lescaut have immortalized
Beaumarchais, Richardson, and the Abbe Prevost.

Superficial thinkers--and there are many in the artist world--have
asserted that sculpture lives only by the nude, that it died with the
Greeks, and that modern vesture makes it impossible. But, in the first
place, the Ancients have left sublime statues entirely clothed--the
_Polyhymnia_, the _Julia_, and others, and we have not found one-tenth
of all their works; and then, let any lover of art go to Florence and
see Michael Angelo's _Penseroso_, or to the Cathedral of Mainz, and
behold the _Virgin_ by Albert Durer, who has created a living woman
out of ebony, under her threefold drapery, with the most flowing, the
softest hair that ever a waiting-maid combed through; let all the
ignorant flock thither, and they will acknowledge that genius can give
mind to drapery, to armor, to a robe, and fill it with a body, just as
a man leaves the stamp of his individuality and habits of life on the
clothes he wears.

Sculpture is the perpetual realization of the fact which once, and
never again, was, in painting called Raphael!

The solution of this hard problem is to be found only in constant
persevering toil; for, merely to overcome the material difficulties to
such an extent, the hand must be so practised, so dexterous and
obedient, that the sculptor may be free to struggle soul to soul with