Lo, with what opportunity earth teems!

How like a fair its ample beauty seems!
Fluttering with flags its proud pavilions rise:

What bright bazaars, what marvellous merchandise,
Down seething alleys what melodious din,

What clamor, importuning from every booth:
At Earth's great mart where Joy is trafficked in

Buy while thy purse yet swells with golden Youth!
Into this fair he sallied forth, not as one to the manner born,

but with the eagerness of a traveller from a far country, who feels as though
he were living in a dream. His attitude to the whole experience

is curiously ingenuous, but perfectly sane and straightforward.
It is the Paris of Murger in which he lives, not the Paris

of Baudelaire and the Second Empire. He takes his experiences lightly.
There is no sign either of any struggle of the soul or of any very rending

tempest of the heart. There is no posing, self-conscious Byronism,
nor any of that morbid dallying with the idea of "sin"

which gives such an unpleasantflavor to a good deal of romantic poetry,
both French and English. There are traces of disappointment and disillusion,

but they are accepted without a murmur as inevitable incidents
of a great, absorbing experience. All this means, of course,

that there is no tragic depth, and little analytic subtlety, in these poems.
They are the work of a young man enamoured of his youth,

enthusiastically grateful for the gift of life, and entirely at his ease
within his own moral code. He had known none of what he himself calls

"that kind of affliction which alone can unfold the profundities
of the human spirit."

It was in Paris that he produced most of the "Juvenilia". He included
only a few of the pieces which he had written at Harvard and in New York.

Thus all, or nearly all, the poems ranged under that title, are, as he said --
Relics of the time when I too fared

Across the sweet fifth lustrum of my days.
Paris, however, did not absorb him entirely during these years.

He would occasionally set forth on long tramps through the French provinces;
for he loved every aspect of that gracious country. He once spent some weeks

with a friend in Switzerland; but this experience seems to have left no trace
in his work.

Then came the fateful year 1914. His "Juvenilia" having grown
to a passable bulk, he brought them in the early summer to London,

with a view to finding a publisher for them; but it does not appear
that he took any very active steps to that effect. His days were mainly spent

in the British Museum, and his evenings with a coterie of friends
at the Cafe Royal. In the middle of July, his father came to England

and spent a week with him. Of this meeting Mr. Seeger writes:
==

We passed three days at Canterbury -- three days of such intimacy
as we had hardly had since he was a boy in Mexico. For four or five years

I had only seen him a few days at a time, during my hurried visits
to the United States. We explored the old town together,

heard services in the Cathedral, and had long talks in the close.
After service in the Cathedral on a Monday morning,

the last of our stay at Canterbury, Alan was particularly enthusiastic
over the reading of the Psalms, and said "Was there ever such English written

as that of the Bible?" I said good-bye to Alan on July 25th.
==

Two days earlier, the Austrian Ultimatum had been presented to Serbia;
on that very day the time limit expired, the Serbian reply was rejected,

and the Austrian Minister left Belgrade. The wheels of fate
were already whirling.

As soon as it became evident that a European war was inevitable
Alan returned to Paris. He took Bruges on his way, and there left

the manuscript of his poems in the keeping of a printer,
not foreseeing the risks to which he was thus exposing them.

The war was not three weeks old when, along with forty or fifty
of his fellow-countrymen, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion of France.

Why did he take this step? Fundamentally, no doubt, because he felt war
to be one of the supreme experiences of life, from which,

when it offered itself, he could not shrink without disloyalty to his ideal.
Long before the war was anything more than a vague possibility,

he had imagined the time
. . . when courted Death shall claim my limbs and find them

Laid in some desert place alone, or where the tides
Of war's tumultuous waves on the wet sands behind them

Leave rifts of gasping life when their red flood subsides.
So far back indeed as May, 1912, he had written to his mother from Paris:

"Is it not fine the way the Balkan States are triumphing?
I have been so excited over the war, it would have needed

a very small opportunity to have taken me over there." It is evident, then,
that the soldier's life had long been included among the possibilities

which fascinated him. But apart from this general proclivity to adventure,
this desire to "live dangerously", he was impelled by a simple sentiment

of loyalty to the country and city of his heart, which he himself explained
in a letter written from the Aisne trenches to `The New Republic'

(New York, May 22, 1915):
==

I have talked with so many of the young volunteers here. Their case
is little known, even by the French, yet altogether interesting and appealing.

They are foreigners on whom the outbreak of war laid no formal compulsion.
But they had stood on the butte in springtime perhaps,

as Julian and Louise stood, and looked out over the myriad twinkling lights
of the beautiful city. Paris -- mystic, maternal, personified,

to whom they owed the happiest moments of their lives -- Paris was in peril.
Were they not under a moral obligation, no less binding than [that by which]

their comrades were bound legally, to put their breasts between her
and destruction? Without renouncing their nationality, they had yet chosen

to make their homes here beyond any other city in the world.
Did not the benefits and blessings they had received point them a duty

that heart and conscience could not deny?
"Why did you enlist?" In every case the answer was the same.

That memorable day in August came. Suddenly the old haunts were desolate,
the boon companions had gone. It was unthinkable to leave the danger to them

and accept only the pleasures oneself, to go on enjoying
the sweet things of life in defence of which they were perhaps even then

shedding their blood in the north. Some day they would return,
and with honor -- not all, but some. The old order of things

would have irrevocably vanished. There would be a new companionship
whose bond would be the common danger run, the common sufferings borne,

the common glory shared. "And where have you been all the time,
and what have you been doing?" The very question would be a reproach,

though none were intended. How could they endure it?
Face to face with a situation like that, a man becomes reconciled,

justifies easily the part he is playing, and comes to understand,
in a universe where logic counts for so little and sentiment and the impulse

of the heart for so much, the inevitableness and naturalness of war.
Suddenly the world is up in arms. All mankind takes sides. The same faith

that made him surrender himself to the impulses of normal living and of love,
forces him now to make himself the instrument through which a greater force

works out its inscrutable ends through the impulses of terror and repulsion.
And with no less a sense of moving in harmony with a universe

where masses are in continualconflict and new combinations are engendered
out of eternal collisions, he shoulders arms and marches forth with haste.

==
Already in this passage we can discern the fatalistic acceptance of war

which runs through many of his utterances on the subject,
and may be read especially in the noble conclusion of his poem, "The Hosts":

There was a stately drama writ
By the hand that peopled the earth & air

And set the stars in the infinite
And made night gorgeous & morning fair;

And all that had sense to reason knew
That bloody drama must be gone through.

Some sat & watched how the action veered --
Waited, profited, trembled, cheered --