religious and ethical zeal which fires the whole history of the
people, and of which she herself felt the living glow within her own
soul? She had come upon the secret and the genius of Judaism,--that
absolute interpenetration and transfusion of spirit with body and
substance which, taken literally, often reduces itself to a question
of food and drink, a dietary regulation, and again, in proper
splendor,
incarnates itself and shines out before humanity in the prophets,
teachers, and saviors of mankind.

Those were busy, fruitful years for Emma Lazarus, who worked, not
with the pen alone, but in the field of practical and beneficent
activity. For there was an immense task to accomplish. The tide of
immigration had set in, and ship after ship came laden with hunted
human beings flying from their fellow-men, while all the time, like
a tocsin, rang the terrible story of cruelty and persecution,--horrors
that the pen refuses to dwell upon. By the hundreds and thousands
they flocked upon our shores,--helpless, innocent victims of injustice
and oppression, panic-stricken in the midst of strange and utterly
new surroundings.

Emma Lazarus came into personal contact with these people, and
visited them in their refuge on Ward Island. While under the
influence of all the emotions aroused by this great crisis in the
history of her race, she wrote the "Dance of Death," a drama of
persecution of the twelfth century, founded upon the 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 in Thuringia, where the Jews, living, as the deemed, in