So far as I could remember, Paul Dunbar was the only man of pure African blood and American civilization to feel the Negro life esthetically and express it lyrically.

It seemed to me that this had come to its most modern consciousness in him, and that his brilliant and unique achievement was to have studied the American Negro objectively, and to have represented him as he found him to be, with humor, with sympathy, and yet with what the reader must instinctively feel to be entire truthfulness.

I said that a race which had come to this effect in any member of it had attained civilization in him, and I permitted myself the imaginative prophecy that the hostilities and the prejudices which had so long constrained his race were destined to vanish in the arts; that these were to be the final proof that God had made of one blood all nations of men.

I thought his merits positive and not comparative; and I held that if his black poems had been written by a white man I should not have found them less admirable.

I accepted them as an evidence of the essential unity of the human race, which does not think or feel black in one and white in another, but humanly in all." The Bookman says of Mr.Dunbar: "It is safe to assert that accepted as an Anglo-Saxon poet, he would have received little or no consideration in a hurried weighing of the mass of contemporary verse." "But Mr.Dunbar, as his pleasing, manly, and not unrefined face shows, is a poet of the African race; and this novel and suggestive fact at once placed his work upon a peculiar footing of interest, of study, and of appreciative welcome.