the last supreme
ordeal can realize that wonderful flash and fire of the spirit before
its extinction. Never did she appear so brilliant. Wasted to a shadow,
and between acute attacks of pain, she talked about art, poetry, the
scenes of travel, of which her brain was so full, and the phases of her
own condition, with an eloquence for which even those who knew her best
were quite unprepared. Every faculty seemed sharpened and every sense
quickened as the "strong deliveress" approached, and the ardent soul was
released from the frame that could no longer contain it.

We cannot restrain a feeling of suddenness and incompleteness and a
natural pang of wonder and regret for a life so richly and so vitally
endowed thus cut off in its prime. But for us it is not fitting to
question or repine, but rather to rejoice in the rare possession that
we hold. What is any life, even the most rounded and complete, but a
fragment and a hint? What Emma Lazarus might have accomplished, had she
been spared, it is idle and even ungrateful to speculate. What she did
accomplish has real and peculiar significance. It is the privilege of
a favored few that every fact and circumstance of their individuality
shall add lustre and value to what they achieve. To be born a Jewess was
a distinction for Emma Lazarus, and she in turn conferred distinction
upon her race. To be born a woman also lends a grace and a subtle
magnetism to her influence. Nowhere is there contradiction or
incongruity. Her works bear the imprint of her character, and her
character of her works; the same directness and honesty, the same limpid
purity of tone, and the same atmosphere of things refined and beautiful.
The vulgar, the false, and the ignoble,--she scarcely comprehended them,
while on every side she was open and ready to take in and respond to
whatever can adorn and enrich life. Literature was no mere "profession"
for her, which shut out other possibilities; it was only a free, wide
horizon and background for culture. She was passionately devoted to
music, which inspired some of her best poems; and during the last years
of her life, in hours of intense physical suffering, she found relief
and consolation in listening to the strains of Bach and Beethoven. When
she went abroad, painting was revealed to her, and she threw herself
with the same ardor and enthusiasm into the study of the great masters;
her last work (left unfinished) was a critical analysis of the genius
and