GEORGINA PELL CURTIS.
Georgina Pell Curtis, daughter of Alfred Leonard and Maria Elizabeth (Hill) Curtis, was born in New York city, February 19th, 1859. At the age of seven years she lost her hearing and was educated at the Fort Washington, N. Y., Deaf and Dumb Institute, and by private tutors. At the age of thirteen she was sent to St. Mary's Protestant Episcopal School, New York, where she remained until her graduation at the age of seventeen. At this school she was the only deaf pupil. For five years after graduation she studied art and worked under different masters, and had almost decided to adopt art as a profession when it was suggested to her that she should try and write. This she thought quite impossible, but was urged so strongly that she made the attempt, and succeeded.
In the meantime, she had joined the Roman Catholic Church, and it is as a Catholic writer that she is best known. She has written for all the best Catholic magazines and has brought out three books—"Trammellings," a collection of short stories of which she is the author; "Some Roads to Rome in America," and "The American Catholic Who's Who," of which she is the editor. Miss Curtis is lineally descended on the paternal side from Peregrine White, the first child born in the Mayflower colony.
The first edition of the "American Catholic Who's Who" appeared in 1911, and the editor hopes to bring it out every year or two, making it a permanent record of prominent American Catholics in the United States, Canada and Europe.
EMMA LAZARUS.
A prominent Jewish educator has recently said, in speaking of his people in America, "We cannot boast such a poet as Heine, a soldier in the intellectual war of liberation which has freed European thought from its mediaeval shackles, but there did bloom amongst us the delicate flower of Emma Lazarus' work." And, indeed, it is to be doubted whether poetic feeling and the strength of this young writer's work has been excelled by any other American author.
Emma Lazarus was born in New York City, July 22, 1849, and despite the fact that death came to her just as she had reached her prime she had gained a place and made a mark in literature far above the achievements of many eminent lives well rounded by age. She was the daughter of Moses Lazarus, a well-known merchant of New York, and received a literary education under private tutors. Her attainments included Hebrew, Greek and Latin and modern languages. Even in her childhood she was noted for her quickness and intelligence and her text-book education she herself broadened by her reading on religious, philosophical, and scientific subjects until she became a profound thinker. Her literary bent displayed itself when at seventeen years of age she published a volume of poems, "Admetus," which at once attracted attention by the remarkable character of the work and which brought her many flattering notices.
In 1874 she produced her first important work, "Alide," a romance founded on the episodes in the early life of Goethe. Some translations from Heine that followed were even more successful in making her known. In 1880 was begun the
