Page:Americans (1922).djvu/335

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clue to "a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder."

The bronze statue by St. Gaudens which in 1887 Henry Adams caused to be erected, without inscription, upon the grave of his wife in the Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, seems curiously to symbolize the spirit and the fruit of his own pilgrimage. The strangely haunting figure, enveloped in heavy drapery, sits on a rough-hewn block of granite against a granite wall, the great limbs in repose, the right hand supporting the face, shadowed and almost invisible. Here at sunset, after long wandering, the Pilgrim comes at last to the place where no answers are given; at the gateless wall ponders the mysteries, silent, passive, thinking without hope yet without despair: "Here restless minds and limbs of divine mold rest at last. This is the place of dust and shadow and the dispersion of all that was sweet and fair into the devouring tides of energy. This may be the end of all, forever and ever. If so, so be it."

Thus that sombre figure appears to commune with itself; but so much will is manifest even in its repose, it seems so undefeated even in defeat, that the visitor departs saying to himself: "Man is the animal that destiny cannot break."