Here are a few white men in the wilds of Africa, surrounded by the uncivilized children of the desert.  They have money and valuable instruments, a large variety of gewgaws that possessed the power of charming the fancy of the average savage; and therefore the whites would have been a tempting prey to the blacks.  But not a hair of their head was harmed.  The white men had geographical fame to encourage them in the struggle,—­friends and loved ones far away beyond the beautiful blue sea.  These poor savages had nothing to steady their purposes save a paltry sum of money as day-wages,—­no home, no friends; and yet they were as loyal as if a throne were awaiting them.  No, no! nothing waited on their heroic devotion to a magnificent cause but a lonely death when they had brought the “master” to the sea.  When their stomachs, pinched by hunger; when their limbs, stiff from travel; when their eyes, dim with the mists of death; when every vital force was slain by an heroic ambition to serve the great Stanley; when the fires of endeavor were burnt to feeble embers,—­then, and only then, would these faithful Negroes fail in the fulfilment of their mission, so full of peril, and yet so grateful to them, because it was in the line of duty.

Cicero urged virtue as necessary to effective oratory.  The great majority of Negroes in Africa are both orators and logicians.  A people who have such noble qualities as this race seems to possess has, as a logical necessity, the poetic element in a large degree.

In speaking of Negro poetry, we shall do so under three different heads; viz., the Epic, Idyllic, Religious, or miscellaneous.

The epic poetry of Africa, so far as known, is certainly worthy of careful study.  The child must babble before it can talk, and all barbarians have a sense of the sublime in speech.  Mr. Taine, in his “History of English Literature,” speaking of early Saxon poetry, says,—­

“One poem nearly whole, and two or three fragments, are all that remain of this lay-poetry of England.  The rest of the pagan current, German and barbarian, was arrested or overwhelmed, first by the influx of the Christian religion, then by the conquest of the Norman-French.  But what remains more than suffices to show the strange and powerful poetic genius of the race, and to exhibit beforehand the flower in the bud.

“If there has ever been anywhere a deep and serious poetic sentiment, it is here.  They do not speak:  they sing, or rather they shout.  Each little verse is an acclamation, which breaks forth like a growl; their strong breasts heave with a groan of anger or enthusiasm, and a vehement or indistinct phrase or expression rises suddenly, almost in spite of them, to their lips.  There is no art, no natural talent, for describing, singly and in order, the different parts of an object or an event.  The fifty rays of light which every phenomenon emits in