With Emma Lazarus, however, this sombre streak has a deeper root;
something of birth and temperament is in it--the stamp and heritage
of a race born to suffer. But dominant and fundamental though it was,
Hebraism was only latent thus far. It was classic and romantic art
that first attracted and inspired her. She pictures Aphrodite the
beautiful, arising from the waves, and the beautiful Apollo and his
loves,--Daphne, pursued by the god, changing into the laurel, and the
enamored Clytie into the faithful sunflower. Beauty, for its own
sake, supreme and unconditional, charmed her primarily and to the end.
Her restless spirit found repose in the pagan idea,--the absolute
unity and identity of man with nature, as symbolized in the Greek
myths, where every natural force becomes a person, and where, in turn,
persons pass with equal readiness and freedom back into nature again.

In this connection a name would suggest itself even if it did not
appear,--Heine, the Greek, Heine the Jew, Heine the Romanticist, as
Emma Lazarus herself has styled him; and already in this early volume
of hers we have trace of the kinship and affinity that afterwards so
plainly declared itself. Foremost among the translations are a
number of his songs, rendered with a finesse and a literalness that
are rarely combined. Four years later, at the age of twenty-one,
she published her second volume, "Admetus and Other Poems," which
at once took rank as literature both in America and England, and
challenged comparison with the work of established writers. Of
classic themes we have "Admetus" and "Orpheus," and of romantic the
legend of Tannhauser and of the saintly Lohengrin. All are treated
with an artistic finish that shows perfect mastery of her craft,
without detracting from the freshness and flow of her inspiration.
While sounding no absolutely new note in the world, she yet makes
us aware of a talent of unusual distinction, and a highly endowed