Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/20

, 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 begun at the Staten Island Academy. The great delight of the ten-year-old schoolboy was to follow the rushing fire-engines which were an almost daily feature in the life of the New York streets. Even in manhood he could never resist the lure of the fire-alarm.

Two years later (1900) came a new migration, which no doubt exercised a determining influence on the boy's development. The family removed to Mexico, and there Alan spent a great part of the most impressionable years of his youth. If New York embodies the romance of Power, Mexico represents to perfection the romance of Picturesqueness. To pass from the United States to Mexico is like passing at one bound from the New World to the Old. Wherever it has not been recently Americanized, its beauty is that of sunbaked, somnolent decay. It is in many ways curiously like its mother—or rather its step-mother—country, Spain. But Spain can show nothing to equal the spacious magnificence of its scenery or the picturesqueness of its physiognomies and its costumes. And then it is the scene of the most fascinating adventure recorded in history—an exploit which puts to xvi