ce and freedom, did, as a matter of fact,
lend new reality and poignancy to his verse; but the soldier's life
left him small leisure for composition. We must regard his work, then,
as a fragment, a mere foretaste of what he might have achieved
had his life been prolonged. But, devoted though he was to his art,
he felt that to live greatly is better than to write greatly.
The unfulfilment of his poetic hopes and dreams meant
the fulfilment of a higher ambition.

Alan Seeger was born in New York on June 22nd, 1888.
His father and his mother belonged to old New England families.

When he was a year old his parents removed to Staten Island,
which forms, as it were, the stopper to the bottle of New York harbour.
There he remained until his tenth year, growing up along with
a brother and a sister, the one a little older, the other a little younger,
than himself. From their home on the heights of Staten Island,
the children looked out day by day upon one of the most romantic scenes
in the world--the gateway to the Western Hemisphere.
They could see the great steamships of all the nations
threading their way through the Narrows and passing in procession
up the glorious expanse of New York Bay, to which the incessant local traffic
of tug-boats, river steamers and huge steam-ferries lent
an ever-shifting animation. In the foreground lay Robbins Reef Lighthouse,
in the middle distance the Statue of Liberty, in the background
the giant curves of Brooklyn Bridge, and, range over range,
the mountainous buildings of "down town" New York--not then as colossal
as they are to-day, but already unlike anything else under the sun.
And the incoming stream of tramps and liners met the outgoing stream
which carried the imagination seaward, to the islands of the buccaneers,
and the haunts of all the heroes and villains of history, in the Old World.
The children did not look with incurious eyes upon this stirring scene.
They knew the names of all the great European liners and of the warships
passing to and from the Navy Yard; and the walls of their nursery
were covered with their drawings of the shipping, rude enough, no doubt,
but showing accurate observation of such details as funnels,
masts and rigging. They were of an age, before they left Staten Island,
to realize something of the historic implications of their environment.

In 1898 the family returned to New York, and there Alan continued
at the Horace Mann School the education b