apart from the author's race, origin, and condition. The world is too
old now, and I find myself too much of its mood, to care for the work of
a poet because he is black, because his father and mother were slaves,
because he was, before and after he began to write poems, an
elevator-boy. These facts would certainly attract me to him as a man, if
I knew him to have a literary ambition, but when it came to his literary
art, I must judge it irrespective of these facts, and enjoy or endure it
for what it was in itself.

It seems to me that this was my experience with the poetry of Paul
Laurence Dunbar when I found it in another form, and in justice to him I
cannot wish that it should be otherwise with his readers here. Still, it
will legitimately interest those who like to know the causes, or, if
these may not be known, the sources, of things, to learn that the father
and mother of the first poet of his race in our language were negroes
without admixture of white blood. The father escaped from slavery in
Kentucky to freedom in Canada, while there was still no hope of freedom
otherwise; but the mother was freed by the events of the civil war, and
came North to Ohio, where their son was born at Dayton, and grew up with
such chances and mischances for mental training as everywhere befall the
children of the poor. He has told me that his father picked up the trade
of a plasterer, and when he had taught himself to read, loved chiefly to
read history. The boy's mother shared his passion for literature, with a
special love of poetry, and after the father died she struggled on in
more than the poverty she had shared with him. She could value the
faculty which her son showed first in prose sketches and attempts at
fiction, and she was proud of the praise and kindness they won him among
the people of the town, where he has never been without the warmest and
kindest friends.