Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/59

Rh While in the garden, faint for want of room, The splendid failure pines within her bower. There is a wide republic of perfume, In which the nameless waifs of sun and shower, That scatter wildly through the fields and woods, Make the divineness of the solitudes.

After such a manner wrote those whom we may call bards of an elder day.

He came, a dark youth, singing in the dawn Of a new freedom, glowing o’er his lyre, Refining, as with great Apollo’s fire, His people’s gift of song. And, thereupon, This Negro singer, come to Helicon, Constrained the masters, listening, to admire, And roused a race to wonder and aspire, Gazing which way their honest voice was gone, With ebon face uplit of glory’s crest. Men marveled at the singer, strong and sweet, Who brought the cabin’s mirth, the tuneful night, But faced the morning, beautiful with light, To die while shadows yet fell toward the west, And leave his laurels at his people’s feet. —James David Corrothers.

Less than a generation ago William Dean Howells hailed Paul Laurence Dunbar as “the first instance of an American Negro who had evinced innate distinction in literature,” “the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel Negro life æsthetically and express it