with a recognition of the fact that it offered the surest way by which he could get a hearing.  Often he said to me:  “I’ve got to write dialect poetry; it’s the only way I can get them to listen to me.”  I was with Dunbar at the beginning of what proved to be his last illness.  He said to me then:  “I have not grown.  I am writing the same things I wrote ten years ago, and am writing them no better.”  His self-accusation was not fully true; he had grown, and he had gained a surer control of his art, but he had not accomplished the greater things of which he was constantly dreaming; the public had held him to the things for which it had accorded him recognition.  If Dunbar had lived he would have achieved some of those dreams, but even while he talked so dejectedly to me he seemed to feel that he was not to live.  He died when he was only thirty-three.

It has a bearing on this entire subject to note that Dunbar was of unmixed Negro blood; so, as the greatest figure in literature which the colored race in the United States has produced, he stands as an example at once refuting and confounding those who wish to believe that whatever extraordinary ability an Aframerican shows is due to an admixture of white blood.

As a man, Dunbar was kind and tender.  In conversation he was brilliant and polished.  His voice was his chief charm, and was a great element in his success as a reader of his own works.  In his actions he was impulsive as a child, sometimes even erratic; indeed, his intimate friends almost looked upon him as a spoiled boy.  He was always delicate in health.  Temperamentally, he belonged to that class of poets who Taine says are vessels too weak to contain the spirit of poetry, the poets whom poetry kills, the Byrons, the Burns’s, the De Mussets, the Poes.

To whom may he be compared, this boy who scribbled his early verses while he ran an elevator, whose youth was a battle against poverty, and who, in spite of almost insurmountable obstacles, rose to success?  A comparison between him and Burns is not unfitting.  The similarity between many phases of their lives is remarkable, and their works are not incommensurable.  Burns took the strong dialect of his people and made it classic; Dunbar took the humble speech of his people and in it wrought music.

Mention of Dunbar brings up for consideration the fact that, although he is the most outstanding figure in literature among the Aframericans of the United States, he does not stand alone among the Aframericans of the whole Western world.  There are Placido and Manzano in Cuba; Vieux and Durand in Haiti, Machado de Assis in Brazil; Leon Laviaux in Martinique, and others still that might be mentioned, who stand on a plane with or even above Dunbar.  Placido and Machado de Assis rank as great in the literatures of their respective countries without any qualifications whatever.  They are world figures in the literature of the Latin languages.  Machado de Assis is somewhat