Lazarus was a born singer, but she did not sing, like a bird, for
joy of being alive; and of being young, alas! there is no hint in
these youthful effusions, except inasmuch as this unrelieved gloom,
this ignorance of "values," so to speak, is a sign of youth, common
especially among gifted persons of acute and premature sensibilities,
whose imagination, not yet focused by reality, overreached the mark.
With Emma Lazarus, however, this sombre streak has a deeper root;
something of birth and temperament is in it--the stamp and heritage
of a race born to suffer. But dominant and fundamental though it was,
Hebraism was only latent thus far. It was classic and romantic art
that first attracted and inspired her. She pictures Aphrodite the
beautiful, arising from the waves, and the beautiful Apollo and his
loves,--Daphne, pursued by the god, changing into the laurel, and the
enamored Clytie into the faithful sunflower. Beauty, for its own
sake, supreme and unconditional, charmed her primarily and to the end.
Her restless spirit found repose in the pagan idea,--the absolute
unity and identity of man with nature, as symbolized in the Greek
myths, where every natural force becomes a person, and where, in turn,
persons pass with equal readiness and freedom back into nature again.

In this connection a name would suggest itself even if it did not
appear,--Heine, the Greek, Heine the Jew, Heine the Romanticist, as
Emma Lazarus herself has styled him; and already in this early volume
of hers we have trace of the kinship and affinity that afterwards so
plainly declared itself. Foremost among the translations are a
number of his songs, rendered with a finesse and a literalness that
are rarely combined. Four years later, at the age of twenty-one,
she published her second volume, "Admetus and Other Poems," which
at once took rank as literature both in America and England, and
challenged comparison with the work of established writers. Of