nto "society" of a more orthodox type.
Paris has had many lovers, but few more devoted than Alan Seeger.
He accepted the life of "die singende, springende, schoene Paris"
with a curious whole-heartedness. Here and there we find evidence
-- for instance, in the first two sonnets--that he was not blind
to its seamy side. But on the whole he appears to have seen beauty
even in aspects of it for which it is almost as difficult
to find aesthetic as moral justification. The truth is, no doubt,
that the whole spectacle was plunged for him in the glamour of romance.
Paris did not belong to the working-day world, but was like
Baghdad or Samarcand, a city of the Arabian Nights.
How his imagination transfigured it we may see in such a passage as this:

By silvery waters in the plains afar
Glimmers the inland city like a star,
With gilded gates and sunny spires ablaze,
And burnished domes half seen through luminous haze.
Lo, with what opportunity earth teems!
How like a fair its ample beauty seems!
Fluttering with flags its proud pavilions rise:
What bright bazaars, what marvellous merchandise,
Down seething alleys what melodious din,
What clamor, importuning from every booth:
At Earth's great mart where Joy is trafficked in
Buy while thy purse yet swells with golden Youth!

Into this fair he sallied forth, not as one to the manner born,
but with the eagerness of a traveller from a far country, who feels as though
he were living in a dream. His attitude to the whole experience
is curiously ingenuous, but perfectly sane and straightforward.
It is the Paris of Murger in which he lives, not the Paris
of Baudelaire and the Second Empire. He takes his experiences lightly.
There is no sign either of any struggle of the soul or of any very rending
tempest of the heart. There is no posing, self-conscious Byronism,
nor any of that morbid dallying with the idea of "sin"
which gives such an unpleasant flavor to a good deal of romantic poetry,
both French and English. There are traces of disappointment and disillusion,
but they are accepted without a murmur as inevitable incidents
of a great, absorbing experience. All this means, of course,
that there is no tragic depth, and little analytic subtlety, in these poems.
They are the work of a young man enamoured of his youth,
enthusiastically grateful for the gift of life, and entirely at his ease
within his own moral code. He had known