โ Scribed by Isham Randolph
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
We had visions, oh ! they were as grand As ever floated out of fancy land," are words sung by a poet of our own land to the ears of a few who knew, honored, and loved the singer.
He sang of " The Lost Cause " with a beauty and a pathos that touched the hearts of all who mourned for the men who followed that " conquered banner " along the path that led " to glory and the grave. "
'1 he sculptor beholds in blocks of marble forms that are hid from his fellow-men, who see only a mass of stubborn stone. The explorers of Olympia have resurrected from the detritus which buried them treasures of Grecian art wrought from the marbles by Phidias, Praxiteles, and others whose chisels made Greece beautiful and themselves famous.
\Vithin our own time one of our own race and nation saw in a marble block an imprisoned form and day by day, with mallet and chisel, he toiled to liberate the loveliness of face, torso, and limb that duller eyes could not see, but which the opaque covering could not hide from him. The encasing stone must be removed carefully, skilfully, gently, that the fair brow might not be scarred nor the delicate outlines of the face, form, or limb be marred.
Little by little the revelation which, from the first, was so clear to the sculptor came to his dull-eyed fellows, and at last the Greek Slave came forth in all of her womanly beauty to delight the human vision until she, too, shall some day be buried, like the wonderful creations of Praxiteles, in some overwhelming convulsion of Nature.
It is not, however, of the poet's inspired imaginings nor of the revelations of the sculptor's art that I am to speak, but of
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