The echo faints and fails; It suiteth not, upon this western plain, Our voice or spirit; we should stir again The wilderness, and make the vales Resound unto a yet unheard-of strain. The life of Emma Lazarus was brief and externally eventless. Born in New York City in a home of refinement and wealth, as a child precocious, inclined to seriousness, intense, she passed her early life among books rather than among companions. At seventeen she had issued a collection of verses, melancholy even above the usual poetry of women, valueless utterly; then at twenty-one she had published again, now a long poem, Greek in its chaste beauty, _Admetus_, inscribed "To My Friend Ralph Waldo Emerson." Two forces were contending, even as they had contended in Heine. In Paris in later years before the Venus of the Louvre she wrote a sonnet, and, miracle among modern sonnets, it is impassioned, unfettered, alive--a woman's soul: ... I saw not her alone, Serenely poised on her world-worshiped throne, As when she guided once her dove-drawn car,-- But at her feet a pale, death-stricken Jew, Her life adorer, sobbed farewell to love. Here _Heine_ wept! Here still he weeps anew, Nor ever shall his shadow lift or move, While mourns one ardent heart, one poet-brain, For vanished Hellas and Hebraic pain. Until 1876 quiet emotion, Hellenic beauty, romance without passion. "Tannhäuser" suggests William Morris and _The Earthly Paradise_. Then came _The Spagnioletto_, a tense drama, which showed for the first time the latent embers in her Hebraic soul. It needed but a breath to kindle them and that breath came with reports of the Jewish massacres of 1879. No more of Hellenism. With Liebhaid in _The Dance of Death_, that most tense drama in American literature, she could cry out: No more of that. I am all Israel's now--till this cloud pass, I have no thought, no passion, no desire, Save for my people. Henceforth fiery lyrics of denunciation, rallying cries, translations of Hebrew prophets, songs of encouragement and cheer, as "The Crowing of the Red Cock," "In Exile," "The New Ezekiel," "The Valley of Baca," and, most Hebraic of all, "The Banner of the Jew," with its ringing lines: Oh, for Jerusalem's trumpet now, To blow a blast of shattering power, To wake the sleepers high and low, And rouse them to the urgent hour! No hand for vengeance--but to save, A million naked swords should wave. The fire was too intense for the frail, sensitive body. Suddenly, like Heine, she was on a "mattress grave," powerless, though never so eager, never so quivering with burning message. She died at thirty-eight.