Poet.
St. Michael's Chapel.
Life and Art.
Sympathy.
Youth and Death.
Age and Death.
City Visions.
Influence.
Restlessness.

THE SPAGNOLETTO: A Play in Five Acts.

Publisher's note: Thanks are due to the Editors of "The Century,"
Lippincott's Magazine, and "The Critic," for their courtesy in
allowing the poems published by them to be reprinted in these
pages.

EMMA LAZARUS. (Written for "The Century Magazine")

Born July 22, 1849; Died November 19, 1887.

One hesitates to lift the veil and throw the light upon a life so hidden
and a personality so withdrawn as that of Emma Lazarus; but while her
memory is fresh, and the echo of her songs still lingers in these pages,
we feel it a duty to call up her presence once more, and to note the
traits that made it remarkable and worthy to shine out clearly before
the world. Of dramatic episode or climax in her life there is none;
outwardly all was placid and serene, like an untroubled stream whose
depths alone hold the strong, quick tide. The story of her life is the
story of a mind, of a spirit, ever seeking, ever striving, and pressing
onward and upward to new truth and light. Her works are the mirror of
this progress. In reviewing them, the first point that strikes us is the
precocity, or rather the spontaneity, of her poetic gift. She was a born
singer; poetry was her natural language, and to write was less effort
than to speak, for she was a shy, sensitive child, with strange reserves
and reticences, not easily putting herself "en rapport" with those
around her. Books were her world from her earliest years; in them she
literally lost and found herself. She was eleven years old when the War
of Succession broke out, which inspired her first lyric outbursts.
Her poems and translations written between the ages of fourteen and
seventeen were collected, and constituted her first published volume.
Crude and immature as these productions naturally were, and utterly
condemned by the writer's later judgment, they are, nevertheless, highly
interesting and characteristic, giving, as they do, the keynote of
much that afterwards unfolded itself in her life. One cannot fail to
be rather painfully impressed by the profound melancholy pervading
the book. The opening poem is "In Memoriam,"--on the death of a school
friend and companion; and the two following poems also have death for
theme. "On a Lock of my