Let us complete the grand design of Columbus, by putting Europe and Asia into communication, and that to our advantage, through the heart of our own country. Let us give to his ships, converted into cars, a continued course unknown to all former times. Let us make the iron road-and make it from sea to sea- . . . . the line which will find on our continent the Bay of San Francisco at one end, St. Louis in the middle, the national metropolis and great commercial emporiums at the other, and which shall be adorned with its crowning honor, the colossal statue of the great Columbus, whose design it accomplishes, hewn from the granite mass of a peak of the Rocky Mountains overlooking the road,--the mountain itself the pedestal, and the statue a part of the mountain,--pointing with outstretched arm to the western horizon, and saying to the flying passenger, “There is the East--there is India.”The contract price of the statue to be paid to the artist was ten thousand dollars; the entire expense of the monument about thirty thousand dollars. In the Dublin Exhibition of 1865, Miss Hosmer offered to the public the Sleeping Faun, in marble of life size, which was sold on the day it was opened for five thousand dollars. Sir Charles Eastlake said, “If it had been discovered among the ruins of Rome or Pompeii, it would have been pronounced one of the best of Grecian statues.” It was exhibited again in the Universal Exposition of Paris, 1867, where, with the great paintings of Church, Bierstadt, Huntington, and others, it
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the statesman will be held in honored remembrance, when the party struggles of his time will be forgotten, when majestic journeys across the continent will be incidents of common life.
Our readers will be glad to see the peroration of the speech on the Pacific Railroad which suggested the motto:--
S. M. Betts and Company. Hartford, Conn. 1871.
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