e has shared the portion of his race in hardship,
poverty and toil. He does not know why he wrote these poems. It is an
amazing thing that he should have done so--a freak, we may call it, of
the wind of genius, which bloweth where it listeth and singles out one
in ten thousand to find a fitting speech for the dumb thought and
feeling of the rest.

But we need not base the claim of Carmichael to the attention of the
public merely on considerations of this sort. His work speaks for
itself. It is original and sincere. It follows no traditions and suffers
no affectation. It is artless, yet it reaches the goal of art. The
rhythms, especially of some of the religious pieces, are of a kind which
is beyond the reach of effort. He has rightly called them melodies.
Occasionally there is, it seems to me, a touch of something higher, as
in the haunting refrain of the lyric "Winter is Coming."

De yaller leafs are falling fas'
Fur summer days is been and pas'
The air is blowin' mighty cold,
Like it done in days of old.

But this is rare. Oftenest the characteristic note is humor, or tender
melancholy relieved by a philosophy of cheer and courage, and the poetic
virtue is that of simple truth. We are reminded of no poet so strongly
as of Burns.

What Waverley Carmichael may accomplish in the future I do not know. But
certainly in this volume he has entitled himself to the gratitude of his
own race and to the sympathetic appreciation of all who have its
interests and those of true poetry at heart."

JAMES HOLLY HANFORD.

Mr. William Stanley Braithwaite speaking of his poems had the following
to say:

"Many have claimed the mantle of Paul Laurence Dunbar, but only upon the
shoulders of Waverley Turner Carmichael has it fallen, and he wears it
with becoming grace and fitness. For this poet, a veritable child of
Negro folk, gives expression to its spirit in need and language more
akin to the ante-bellum 'spirituel' than any writer I know. Like those
'black and unknown bards' he sings because he must, with all their
fervid imaginativeness, symbolizations, poignant strains of pathos and
philosophic humor."

Mr. Braithwaite is the best known Negro critic of poetry in the world
today.

As for me who has always lived in the South and know the Southern Negro
through and through, I feel and believe that Carmichael has interpreted
Negro life as never before.

We hope an