assure 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 of superiority.

A word now as to her life and surroundings. She was one of a family of
seven, and her parents were both living. Her winters were passed in
New York, and her summers by the sea. In both places her life was
essentially quiet and retired. The success of her book had been mainly
in the world of letters. In no wise tricked out to catch the public
eye, her writings had not yet made her a conspicuous figure, but were
destined slowly to take their proper place and give her the rank that
she afterwards held.

For some years now almost everything that she wrote was published in
"Lippincott's Magazine," then edited by John Foster Kirk, and we shall
still find in her poems the method and movement of her life. Nature
is still the fount and mirror, reflecting, and again reflected, in the
soul. We have picture after picture, almost to satiety, until we grow
conscious of a lack of substance and body and of vital play to the
thought, as though the brain were spending itself in dreamings and
reverie, the heart feeding upon itself, and the life choked by its
own fullness without due outlet. Happily, however, the heavy cloud of
sadness has lifted, and we feel the subsidence of waves after a storm.
She sings "Matins:"--

"Does not the morn break thus,
Swift, bright, victorious,
With new skies cleared for us
Over the soul storm-tost?
Her night was long and deep,
Strange visions vexed her sleep,
Strange sorrows bade her weep,
Her faith in dawn was lost.

"No halt, no rest for her,
The immortal wanderer
From sphere to higher sphere
Toward the pure source of day.
The new light shames her fears,
Her faithlessness and tears,
As the new sun appears
To light her god-like way."

Nature is the perpetual resource and consolation. "'T is good to be
alive!" she says, and why? Simply,

"To see the light
That plays upon the