the fulfilment of a higher ambition.
Alan Seeger was born in New York on June 22nd, 1888.

His father and his mother belonged to old New England families.
When he was a year old his parents removed to Staten Island,

which forms, as it were, the stopper to the bottle of New York harbour.
There he remained until his tenth year, growing up along with

a brother and a sister, the one a little older, the other a little younger,
than himself. From their home on the heights of Staten Island,

the children looked out day by day upon one of the most romantic scenes
in the world -- the gateway to the Western Hemisphere.

They could see the great steamships of all the nations
threading their way through the Narrows and passing in procession

up the gloriousexpanse of New York Bay, to which the incessant local traffic
of tug-boats, river steamers and huge steam-ferries lent

an ever-shifting animation. In the foreground lay Robbins Reef Lighthouse,
in the middle distance the Statue of Liberty, in the background

the giant curves of Brooklyn Bridge, and, range over range,
the mountainous buildings of "down town" New York -- not then as colossal

as they are to-day, but already unlike anything else under the sun.
And the incoming stream of tramps and liners met the outgoing stream

which carried the imaginationseaward, to the islands of the buccaneers,
and the haunts of all the heroes and villains of history, in the Old World.

The children did not look with incurious eyes upon this stirring scene.
They knew the names of all the great European liners and of the warships

passing to and from the Navy Yard; and the walls of their nursery
were covered with their drawings of the shipping, rude enough, no doubt,

but showing accurateobservation of such details as funnels,
masts and rigging. They were of an age, before they left Staten Island,

to realize something of the historic implications of their environment.
In 1898 the family returned to New York, and there Alan continued

at the Horace Mann School the education begun at the Staten Island Academy.
The great delight of the ten-year-old schoolboy was to follow

the rushing fire-engines which were an almost daily feature
in the life of the New York streets. Even in manhood he could never resist

the lure of the fire-alarm.
Two years later (1900) came a new migration, which no doubt exercised

a determining influence on the boy's development. The family removed
to Mexico, and there Alan spent a great part of the most impressionable years

of his youth. If New York embodies the romance of Power,
Mexico represents to perfection the romance of Picturesqueness.

To pass from the United States to Mexico is like passing at one bound from
the New World to the Old. Wherever it has not been recently Americanized,

its beauty is that of sunbaked, somnolent decay. It is in many ways
curiously like its mother -- or rather its step-mother -- country, Spain.

But Spain can show nothing to equal the spaciousmagnificence of its scenery
or the picturesqueness of its physiognomies and its costumes.

And then it is the scene of the most fascinating adventure
recorded in history -- an exploit which puts to shame

the imagination of the greatest masters of romance.
It is true that the Mexico City of to-day shows scanty traces

(except in its Museum) of the Tenochtitlan of Montezuma;
but the vast amphitheatre on which it stands is still wonderfully impressive,

and still the great silver cones of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl
look down upon it from their immaculatealtitudes.

Though well within the tropics, the great elevation of the city (7400 feet)
renders its climate very attractive to those for whom height has no terrors;

and the Seegers soon became greatly attached to it.
For two very happy years, it was the home of the whole family.

The children had a tutor whom they respected and loved,
and who helped to develop their taste for poetry and good literature.

"One of our keenest pleasures," writes one of the family, "was to go in a body
to the old book-shops, and on Sunday morning to the `Thieves Market',

to rummage for treasures; and many were the Elzevirs and worm-eaten,
vellum-bound volumes from the old convent libraries that fell into our hands.

At that time we issued a home magazine called `The Prophet',
in honour of a large painting that we had acquired and chose to consider

as the patron of our household. The magazine was supposed to appear monthly,
but was always months behind its time. Alan was the sporting editor,

but his literaryability had even then begun to appear,
and he overstepped his department with contributions of poetry

and lengthy essays. No copies of this famous periodical are extant:
they all went down in the wreck of the `Merida'."

In the chilly days of winter, frequent visits were paid
to the lower levels of the `tierra templada', especially to Cuernavaca,

one of the "show" places of the country. The children learned to ride
and to cycle, and were thus able to extend their excursions on all sides.

When, after two years, they went back to the United States to school,
they were already familiar with Mexican nature and life;

and they kept their impressions fresh by frequentvacation visits.
It must have been a delightful experience to slip down every now and then

to the tropics: first to pass under the pink walls of Morro Castle
into the wide lagoon of Havana; then to cross the Spanish Main to Vera Cruz;

then, after skirting the giant escarpment of Orizaba,
to crawl zigzagging up the almost precipitous ascent

that divides the `tierra templada' from the `tierra fria';
and finally to speed through the endless agave-fields of the upland haciendas,

to Mexico City and home.
Mexico, and the experiences associated with it, have left deep marks

on Alan Seeger's poetry. The vacation voyages thither
speak in this apostrophe from the "Ode to Antares":

Star of the South that now through orient mist
At nightfall off Tampico or Belize

Greetest the sailor, rising from those seas
Where first in me, a fond romanticist,

The tropic sunset's bloom on cloudy piles
Cast out industrious cares with dreams of fabulous isles. . . .

The longest of his poems, "The Deserted Garden" -- a veritable gallery
of imaginativelandscape -- is entirely Mexican in colouring.

Indeed we may conjecture without too much rashness that it is a mere expansion
of the sonnet entitled "Tezcotzinco", the fruit of a solitary excursion

to the ruins of Nezahualcoyotl's baths, in the hills beyond Tezcoco.
But even where there is no painting of definite Mexican scenes,

motives from the vast uplands with their cloud pageantry,
and from the palm-fringed, incandescent coasts, frequently recur in his verse.

For instance, he had not forgotten Mexico when he wrote in a volume
of the Comtesse de Noailles:

Be my companion under cool arcades
That frame some drowsy street and dazzling square,

Beyond whose flowers and palm-tree promenades
White belfries burn in the blue tropic air.

And even when the tropics were finally left behind,
he carried with him in his memory their profusion of colour,

an ever-ready palette on which to draw. Assuredly it was a fortunate chance
that took this lover of sunlight and space and splendor,

in his most receptive years, to regions where they superabound.
Perhaps, had he been confined to gloomier climates, he could not have written:

From a boy
I gloated on existence. Earth to me

Seemed all-sufficient, and my sojourn there
One trembling opportunity for joy.

But the same good fortune pursued him throughout. He seemed predestined
to environments of beauty. When, at fourteen, he left his Mexican home,

it was to go to the Hackley School at Tarrytown, N.Y., an institution
placed on a high hill overlooking that noblest of rivers, the Hudson,

and surrounded by a domain of its own, extending to many acres
of meadow and woodland. An attack of scarlet fever in his childhood

had left his health far from robust, and it was thought
that the altitude of Mexico City was too great for him.

He therefore spent one of his vacations among the hills of New Hampshire,
and was afterwards given a year out of school, with the family

of his former tutor, in Southern California -- again a region
famed for its beauty. He returned much improved in health,

and after a concluding year at Hackley, he entered Harvard College in 1906.
He now plunged into wide and miscellaneousreading, both at Harvard,

and at the magnificent Boston Library. During his first two years at college,
his bent seemed to lie rather towards the studious and contemplative

than towards the active life. His brother, at this time,
appeared to him to be of a more pleasure-loving and adventurous disposition;

and there exists a letter to his mother in which, after contrasting,
with obviousallusion to Chaucer's "Prologue", the mediaeval ideals

of the Knight and the Clerk, he adds: "C. is the Knight and I the Clerk,
deriving more keen pleasure from the perusal of a musty old volume

than in pursuing adventure out in the world." But about the middle
of his Harvard career, a marked change came over his habits of thought