"I hear the winds of autumn sigh, They break my heart, they make me cry; I hear the birds of lovely spring, My hopes revive, I help them sing. Why do I sing? Why do I cry? It lies so deep, I know not why."
Abraham Wald, whose _nom de plume_ is Lessin, is only twenty-eight years old, the youngest and least known of the four poets, yet in some respects the most interesting. He is the only one who is on a level with the intellectual alertness of the day. His education is broad and in some directions thorough. He is the only one of the four poets whom we are discussing who knows Russian, which language he often writes. He is an imaginative critic, a violent socialist, and an excitable lover of nature.
One of his friends called the poet on one occasion an intellectual _débauché_. It was in a Canal Street café, where Wald was talking in an excited tone to several other intellectuals. He is a short, stocky man, with a suggestion of physical power. His eyes are brilliant, and there seems to be going on in him a sort of intellectual consumption. He is restlessly intense in manner, speaks in images, and is always passionately convinced of the truth of what he sees so clearly but seldom expresses in cold logic. His fevered idealism meets you in his frank, quick gaze and impulsive and rapid speech.
Lacking in repose, balance, and sobriety of thought, Wald is well described by his friend's phrase. Equally well he may be called the Jewish bohemian. He is not dissipated in the ordinary sense. Coffee and tea are the drinks he finds in his little cafés. But in these places he practically lives, disputing, arguing, expounding, with whomsoever he may find. He has no fixed home, but sleeps wherever inevitable weariness finds him. He prefers to sleep not at all. Like all his talented tribe he is poor, and makes an occasional dollar by writing a poem or an article for an east side newspaper. When he has collected three or four dollars he quits the newspaper office and seeks again his beloved café, violently to impart his quick-coming thoughts and impulses. Only after his money is gone--and it lasts him many days--does he return to his work on the paper, the editor of which must be an uncommonly good-natured fellow.