books were bread and wine to her, and she absorbed them into her
very being. She felt herself invincibly drawn to the master, "that
fount of wisdom and goodness," and it was her great privilege during
these years to be brought into personal relations with him. From
the first he showed her a marked interest and sympathy, which became
for her one of the most valued possessions of her life. He criticised
her work with the fine appreciation and discrimination that made
him quick to discern the quality of her talent as well as of her
personality, and he was no doubt attracted by her almost transparent
sincerity and singleness of soul, as well as by the simplicity and
modesty that would have been unusual even in a person not gifted.
He constituted himself, in a way, her literary mentor, advised her
as to the books she should read and the attitude of mind she should
cultivate. For some years he corresponded with her very faithfully;
his letters are full of noble and characteristic utterances, and
give evidence of a warm regard that in itself was a stimulus and a
high incentive. But encouragement even from so illustrious a source
failed to elate the young poetess, or even to give her a due sense
of the importance and value of her work, or the dignity of her
vocation. We have already alluded to her modesty in her unwillingness
to assert herself or claim any prerogative,--something even morbid
and exaggerated, which we know not how to define, whether as over-
sensitiveness or indifference. Once finished, the heat and glow of
composition spent, her writings apparently ceased to interest her.
She often resented any allusion to them on the part of intimate
friends, and the public verdict as to their excellence could not
reassure or satisfy her. The explanation is not far, perhaps, to
seek. Was it not the "Ewig-Weibliche" that allows no prestige but
its own? Emma Lazarus was a true woman, too distinctly feminine to
wish to be exceptional, or to stand alone and apart, even by virtue