Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/26

 type. Paris has had many lovers, but few more devoted than Alan Seeger. He accepted the life of "die singende, springende, schöne 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 æsthetic 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 Bagdad or Samarcand, a city of the Arabian Nights. How his imagination transfigured it we may see in such a passage as this:

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 xxii