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Rh so writes of him this same poet in his Ode to Ethiopia.

Twelve years ago a young house-decorator in Cincinnati was stricken down with partial paralysis, since which time he has been bedfast and all but helpless. On this

bed of distress he learned what resources were within himself, powers that in health he knew not of. The fountain of poetry sprang up in what threatened to be a desert life.—The artist-nature within manifested itself in a new realm, the realm of words set to tuneful measures. This artisan, turned by affliction into a poet, is Raymond Garfield Dandridge. Again, ad astra per aspera.

It is not great poetry that Dandridge is giving to the world, but it is poetry. His musings shaped into rhyme reach the heart. They have sweetness and light—“the two most precious things in the