the outward crust, she pierced to the heart of the faith and
"the miracle" of its survival. What was it other than the ever-present,
ever-vivifying spirit itself, which cannot die,--the religious and
ethical zeal which fires the whole history of the people, and of which
she herself felt the living glow within her own soul? She had come upon
the secret and the genius of Judaism,--that absolute interpenetration
and transfusion of spirit with body and substance which, taken
literally, often reduces itself to a question of food and drink, a
dietary regulation, and again, in proper splendor, incarnates itself
and shines out before humanity in the prophets, teachers, and saviors of
mankind.

Those were busy, fruitful years for Emma Lazarus, who worked, not with
the pen alone, but in the field of practical and beneficent activity.
For there was an immense task to accomplish. The tide of immigration had
set in, and ship after ship came laden with hunted human beings flying
from their fellow-men, while all the time, like a tocsin, rang the
terrible story of cruelty and persecution,--horrors that the pen refuses
to dwell upon. By the hundreds and thousands they flocked upon our
shores,--helpless, innocent victims of injustice and oppression,
panic-stricken in the midst of strange and utterly new surroundings.

Emma Lazarus came into personal contact with these people, and visited
them in their refuge on Ward Island. While under the influence of all
the emotions aroused by this great crisis in the history of her race,
she wrote the "Dance of Death," a drama of persecution of the twelfth
century, founded upon the authentic records,--unquestionably her finest
work in grasp and scope, and, above all, in moral elevation and purport.
The scene is laid in Nordhausen, a free city in Thuringia, where the
Jews, living, as the deemed, in absolute security and peace, were caught
up in the wave of persecution that swept over Europe at that time.
Accused of poisoning the wells and causing the pestilence, or black
death, as it was called, they were condemned to be burned.

We do not here intend to enter upon a critical or literary analysis of
the play, or to point out dramatic merits or defects, but we should
like to make its readers feel with us the holy ardor and impulse of
the writer and the spiritual import of the work. The action is without
surprise, the doom fixed from the first; but so glowing is the canvas
with local and historic colo