Page:The poems of Emma Lazarus volume 1.djvu/38

24 with these people, and visited them in their refuge on Ward s Island. While under the influence of all the emotions aroused by this great crisis in the history of her race, she wrote the &quot;Dance to Death,&quot; a drama of persecution of the twelfth century, founded upon authentic records, unquestionably her finest work in grasp and scope, and, above all, in moral elevation and purport. The scene is laid in Nordhausen, a free city of Thuringia, where the Jews, living, as they deemed, in absolute security and peace, were caught up in the wave of persecution that swept over Europe at that time. Accused of poisoning the wells and causing the pestilence, or black death, as it was called, they were condemned to be burned.

We do not here intend to enter upon a critical or literary analysis of the play, or to point out dramatic merits or defects, but we should like to make its readers feel with us the holy ardor and impulse of the writer and the spiritual import of the work. The action is without surprise, the doom fixed from the first; but so glowing is the canvas with local and historic color, so vital and intense the movement, so resistless the &quot; internal evidence,&quot; if we may call it thus, penetrating its very substance and form,- that we are swept along as by a wave of human sympathy and grief. In contrast with &quot; The Spagnoletto,&quot; how large is the theme and how all-embracing