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.  So regarded, it is a most remarkable and hopeful production.”

[Illustration:  PAUL LAWRENCE DUNBAR, THE NEGRO POET.]

We reproduce here one of Dunbar’s dialect poems entitled
WHEN DE CO’N PONE’S HOT.

  Dey is times in life when Nature
    Seems to slip a cog an’ go
  Jes’ a-rattlin’ down creation,
    Lak an ocean’s overflow;
  When de worl’ jes’ stahts a-spinnin’
    Lak a picaninny’s top,
  An’ you’ cup o’ joy is brimmin’
    ’Twel it seems about to slop. 
  An’ you feel jes’ lak a racah
    Dat is trainin’ fu’ to trot—­
  When you’ mammy ses de blessin’
    An’ de co’n pone’s hot.

  When you set down at de table,
    Kin’ o’ weary lak an’ sad,
  ‘An’ you’se jest a little tiahed,
    An’ purhaps a little mad—­
  How you’ gloom tu’ns into gladness,
    How you’ joy drives out de doubt
  When de oven do’ is opened
    An’ de smell comes po’in’ out;
  Why, de ‘lectric light o’ Heaven
    Seems to settle on de spot,
  When yo’ mammy ses de blessin’
    An’ de co’n pone’s hot.

  When de cabbage pot is steamin’
    An’ de bacon good an’ fat,
  When de chittlin’s is a-sputter’n’
    So’s to show yo’ whah dey’s at;
  Take away you sody biscuit,
    Take away yo’ cake an’ pie. 
  Fu’ de glory time is comin’,
    An’ it’s proachin’ very nigh,
  An’ you’ want to jump an’ hollah,
    Do you know you’d bettah not,
  When you mammy ses de blessin’
    An’ de co’n pone’s hot?