in the port, rotary engines drilling, turbines
churning are woven through them. Blankets of fog descend upon the river;
menacing shapes loom through it; rays of red light seek to cut the mist.
Flowers that are gray and black blossom on the ledges of tenement
windows giving on bare walls. And human souls and songs that are gray
and black like them bloom in the blind air, open their velvet petals,
their lustrous, soft corollas, from crannies and windows into this
metal, this dun, this unceasing roar.

For Ornstein is youth. He is the one striving to adjust himself to all
this thunder and welter and glare. He is the spring as it comes up
through the pavements, the aching green sap. In part, no doubt, he is
the resurrection of the most entombed of spirits, that of the outlaw
European Jew. He is the breaking down of the walls with which the Jew
had blotted out the hateful world. He is Lazarus emerging in his grave
clothes into the new world; the Jewish spirit come up into the day from
out the basement and cellar rooms of the synagogue where it had been
seated for a thousand years drugging itself with rabbinical lore,
refining almost maniacally upon the intention of some obscure phrase or
parable, negating the lure of the world and of experience with a mass of
rites and observances and ceremonials, losing itself in the gray desert
stretches of theory, or wasting itself in the impossible dream of Zion
restored in modern Palestine and Solomon's temple rebuilt in a
provincial capital of the Turkish Empire. And Ornstein's music is the
music of a birth that is the tearing away of grave clothes grown to the
body, the clawing away, stone by stone, of the wall erected against the
call of experience which was sure to be death-dealing. The old
prohibitions are still active in it in the terror with which life is
viewed, in the menace and cruelty of things, the sharpness of edges
encountered, the weight of the masses that threaten to fall and
overwhelm, the fury and blackness and horror of nature once again
regarded. Again and again there passes through it the haggard, shrouded
figure of the Russian Jew. The "Poems of 1917" are full of the wailings
and rockings of little old Ghetto mothers. Again and again Ornstein
speaks in accents that resemble nothing quite so much as the savage and
woeful language of the Old Testament.

But the music of Ornstein is much besides. It is a thing germane to all
beings born into the age of steel. It is t