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 Emma
Lazarus herself has styled him; and already in this early volume of hers
we have trace of the kinship and affinity that afterwards so plainly
declared itself. Foremost among the translations are a number of
his songs, rendered with a finesse and a literalness that are rarely
combined. Four years later, at the age of twenty-one, she published her
second volume, "Admetus and Other Poems," which