Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/131

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The way folks had of thanking God He found annoying, till he thought Of flame and coolness in the sod— Of balms and blessings that they wrought

And so the habit grew, and then— Of when and how he did not care— He found his God as other men The mystic verb in a grammar of prayer.

He never knelt, nor uttered words— His laughter felt no chastening rod; “My being,” he said, “is a choir of birds, And all my senses are thanking God.”

Mr. Braithwaite is thoroughly conversant, as these selections indicate, with the subtleties and finest effects of the art poetic, and his impulses to write spring from the deepest human speculations, the purest motives of art. Hence in his work he takes his place among the few.

Under tropical suns, amid the tropical luxuriance of nature, developed the many-hued imagination of the subject of this sketch. His nature is tropical, for Mr. Margetson is a prolific bard: Songs of Life, The Fledgling Bard and the Poetry Society, Ethiopia’s Flight, England in the West Indies—four published books, and more yet