For Ornstein is youth. He is the one striving to adjust himself to all this thunder and welter and glare. He is the spring as it comes up through the pavements, the aching green sap. In part, no doubt, he is the resurrection of the most entombed of spirits, that of the outlaw European Jew. He is the breaking down of the walls with which the Jew had blotted out the hateful world. He is Lazarus emerging in his grave clothes into the new world; the Jewish spirit come up into the day from out the basement and cellar rooms of the synagogue where it had been seated for a thousand years drugging itself with rabbinical lore, refining almost maniacally upon the intention of some obscure phrase or parable, negating the lure of the world and of experience with a mass of rites and observances and ceremonials, losing itself in the gray desert stretches of theory, or wasting itself in the impossible dream of Zion restored in modern Palestine and Solomon's temple rebuilt in a provincial capital of the Turkish Empire. And Ornstein's music is the music of a birth that is the tearing away of grave clothes grown to the body, the clawing away, stone by stone, of the wall erected against the call of experience which was sure to be death-dealing. The old prohibitions are still active in it in the terror with which life is viewed, in the menace and cruelty of things, the sharpness of edges encountered, the weight of the masses that threaten to fall and overwhelm, the fury and blackness and horror of nature once again regarded. Again and again there passes through it the haggard, shrouded figure of the Russian Jew. The "Poems of 1917" are full of the wailings and rockings of little old Ghetto mothers. Again and again Ornstein speaks in accents that resemble nothing quite so much as the savage and woeful language of the Old Testament.