The Poems, vol 2 | Page 4

Fra Pedro.
TRANSLATIONS FROM PETRARCH.
In Vita, LXVII.
In Vita, LXXVI.
In Vita, CV.
In Vita, CIX.
In
Morte, II. On the Death of Cardinal Colonna and Laura. In Morte,
XLIII.
In Vita. Canzone XI.
Fragment. Canzone XII.
Fragment.
Trionfo d'Amore.
Fragment. Trionfo della Morte.
TRANSLATIONS FROM ALFRED DE MUSSET.
The May Night.
The October Night.
NOTES TO "EPISTLE" OF JOSHUA IBN VIVES OF
ALLORQUI.
Most of the poems in this volume were originally printed in

"The American Hebrew."
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and a personality so withdrawn as that of Emma Lazarus; but while her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 Mother's Hair" gives us reflections on

growing old. These are the four poems written at the age of fourteen.
There is not a wholly glad and joyous strain in the volume, and we
might smile at the recurrence of broken vows, broken hearts, and
broken lives in the experience of this maiden just entered upon her
teens, were it not that the innocent child herself is in such deadly
earnest. The two long narrative poems, "Bertha" and "Elfrida," are
tragic in the extreme. Both are dashed off apparently at white heat:
"Elfrida," over fifteen hundred lines of blank verse, in two weeks;
"Bertha," in three and a half. We have said that Emma 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