Page:The book of American negro poetry.djvu/35

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Deprived of all created bliss,

Through hardship, toil, and pain?Come, Liberty! thou cheerful sound,

Roll through my ravished ears;

Come, let my grief in joys be drowned,

And drive away my fears."

In Mrs. Harper we find something more than the complaint and the longing of Horton. We find an expression of a sense of wrong and injustice. The following stanzas are from a poem addressed to the white women of America:

Whitman, in the midst of "The Rape of Florida," a poem in which he related the taking of the State of Florida from the Seminoles, stops and discusses the race question. He discusses it in many other poems; and he discusses it from many different angles. In Whitman we find not only an expression of a sense of wrong and