Fortunate was Coleridge-Taylor to be born in Europe and to speak a universal tongue.  In America he could hardly have had his career.  His genius was, to be sure, recognized (with some palpitation and consternation) when it came full-grown across the seas with an English imprint; but born here, it might never have been permitted to grow.  We know in America how to discourage, choke, and murder ability when it so far forgets itself as to choose a dark skin.  England, thank God, is slightly more civilized than her colonies; but even there the path of this young man was no way of roses and just a shade thornier than that of whiter men.  He did not complain at it,—­he did not

     “Wince and cry aloud.”

Rather the hint here and there of color discrimination in England aroused in him deeper and more poignant sympathy with his people throughout the world.  He was one with that great company of mixed-blooded men:  Pushkin and Dumas, Hamilton and Douglass, Browning and many others; but he more than most of these men knew the call of the blood when it came and listened and answered.  He came to America with strange enthusiasm.  He took with quite simple and unconscious grace the conventional congratulations of the musical world.  He was used to that.  But to his own people—­to the sad sweetness of their voices, their inborn sense of music, their broken, half-articulate voices,—­he leapt with new enthusiasm.  From the fainter shadowings of his own life, he sensed instinctively the vaster tragedy of theirs.  His soul yearned to give voice and being to this human thing.  He early turned to the sorrow songs.  He sat at the faltering feet of Paul Laurence Dunbar and he asked (as we sadly shook our heads) for some masterpiece of this world-tragedy that his soul could set to music.  And then, so characteristically, he rushed back to England, composed a half-dozen exquisite harmonies haunted by slave-songs, led the Welsh in their singing, listened to the Scotch, ordered great music festivals in all England, wrote for Beerbohm Tree, took on another music professorship, promised a trip to Germany, and at last, staggering home one night, on his way to his wife and little boy and girl, fell in his tracks and in four days was dead, at the age of thirty-seven.  They say that in his death-throe he arose and facing some great, ghostly choir raised his last baton, while all around the massive silence rang with the last mist-music of his dying ears.

He was buried from St. Michael’s on September 5, 1912, with the acclaim of kings and music masters and little children and to the majestic melody of his own music.  The tributes that followed him to his grave were unusually hearty and sincere.  The head of the Royal College calls the first production of “Hiawatha” one of the most remarkable events in modern English musical history and the trilogy one of the most universally-beloved works of modern English music.  One critic calls Taylor’s