s
to the circumstances of her color, birth, and condition, a sort of
historic character. Sold at ten years of age, in a public mart of
slaves, she was purchased by Mrs. Wheatley, a lady who educated her, and
who afterwards permitted her to be called by her own name. This negress,
so little known now, has had her day in history; she visited London,
where she was an object of general esteem. Washington corresponded with
her, and the Abbe Gregoire, our revolutionary regicide, announced her a
great poet, in his Essay upon the Intellectual and Moral Faculties of
the Negro. The opponents of slavery applauded her verses with
enthusiasm, and the upholders of slavery denounced and slandered her.
She has been, for a moment, in the eyes of the universe, the noblest
type of her race--this humble black slave has been, in the civilized
world, the representative of all her brethren. Her existence has been
one of the incidents of universal history, and this unknown person has
had her share, however small, in the revolutions of the world.

Maria James was a poor servant, the child of an emigrant from Wales. An
unlettered poet, she drew her only instruction from the Bible, the
Pilgrim's Progress, and Miss Hannah More, a kind of Madame de Genlis of
puritanism; and yet it was this poor girl who wrote the most perfect
lyric, the neatest, and in a literary view, the best composed, that we
find in the collection; the lyrical pieces, by the way, are not
generally well written. The thoughts are indefinite, the images
confounded, and in some way run in upon each other. The principal
sentiment is seldom neatly distinguished. These lyrics are as the
buzzing of bees, or rather as honey scarcely formed, of which each drop
contains the perfume of the flower whence it was extracted. Here is a
piece by Maria James, which we do not give as her best, but which
overflows with a profound religious feeling, and turns the heart of the
reader, for a moment, to the haven of eternal repose:

THE PILGRIMS: TO A LADY.

We met as pilgrims meet,
Who are bound to a distant shrine,
Who spend the hours in converse sweet
From noon to the day's decline--
Soul mingling with soul, as they tell of their fears
And their hopes, as they passed through the valley of tears.

And still they commune with delight,
Of pleasures or toils by the way,
The winds of the desert that chill them by night,
Or heat that o