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 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 "internal evidence," 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 "The Spagnoletto," how large is the theme and how all-embracing the catastrophe! In place of the personal we have the drama of the universal. Love is only a flash now,--a dream caught sight of and at once renounced at a higher claim. "Have you no smile to welcome love with, Liebhaid? Why should you tremble? Prince, I am afraid! Afraid of my own heart, my unfathomed joy, A blasphemy against my father's grief, My people's agony! "What good shall come, forswearing kith and God, To follow the allurements of the heart?" asks the distracted maiden, torn between her love for he princely wooer and her devotion to the people among whom her lot has been cast. "O God! How shall I pray for strength to love him less Than mine own soul! 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." Individuals perish, but great ideas survive,--fortitude and courage, and that exalted loyalty and devotion to principle which alone are worth living and dying for. The Jews pass by in procession--men, women, and children--on their way to the flames, to the sound of music, and in festal array, carrying the gold and silver vessels, the roll of the law, the perpetual lamp and the seven branched silver candle-stick of the synagogue. The crowd hoot and jeer at them.