Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/279

EMMA LAZARUS During the last few years, owing to her change of residence, I met Miss Lazarus less frequently, and I scarcely knew what inference to derive from your feeling biographical sketch, as to her religious attitude and convictions. That she was aglow with the Jewish spirit, proud of her race's history and characteristics, and consecrated to its freedom from oppression throughout the world,—all this is finely manifest; yet her intellectual outlook was so broad that I took her to be a modern Theist in religion, and one who would not stipulate for absolute maintenance of the barriers with which the Mosaic law isolated the Jewish race, in certain respects, from the rest of mankind. Taking into account, however, the forces of birth and training, I could understand how our Miriam of today, filled with the passion of her cause, should return to the Pentateuchal faith—to the Mosaic ritual in its hereditary and most uncompromising form. Nor would any lover of the heroic in life or literature, if such had been her course, desire to have it otherwise.

Eighteen years have passed since I wrote the foregoing characterization, under the grave sense of loss inspired by the pity of her death at the very bloom of her creative genius and her new aspiration.

I saw Miss Lazarus most frequently between 1879 and 1881, when our homes were not far apart and she was often an admired guest in my household. One evening she confided to me her feeling of  [265]