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 spacious magnificence 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 immaculate altitudes.
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 literary ability 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 frequent vacation 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 imaginative landscape—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.