Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/280

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS as to her poetic work; a belief that, with all her passion for beauty and justice, she "had accomplished nothing to stir, nothing to awaken, to teach or to suggest, nothing that the world could not equally well do without." These very words I take from a letter received from her in the same week, and they are the substance of what she had spoken. Although no American poet of her years had displayed from childhood a more genuine gift than hers, I knew exactly what she meant. She had followed art for art's sake, along classic lines, and had added no distinctive element to English song. It suddenly occurred to me to ask her why she had been so indifferent to a vantage-ground which she, a Jewess of the purest stock, held above any other writer. Persecutions of her race were then beginning in Europe. She said that, although proud of her blood and lineage, the Hebrew ideals did not appeal to her; but I replied that I envied her the inspiration she might derive from them.

It was not long before outrages to which the Jews were subjected in Eastern and middle Europe began to stir the civilized world, and the heart and spirit of Emma Lazarus thrilled, as I from the first had believed they would, with the passion and indignation that supplied the motive needed for her song. When we were electrified by those glowing lyrics, "The Crowing of the Red Cock," and "The Banner of the Jew," I felt that she at last had come to her own. When she died, a princess was fallen in Israel. Would that her hand were here to smite the harp, in this [266]