"It is not even presumption to speak of him in the same breath with Verdi.
The breadth and poignancy of Foster's melodies entitle them to the highest
critical respect, as they have received worldwide appreciation from great
musicians and plain music lovers. Wherever he has gone he has reached the
popular heart. Here in the United States he has quickened the pulse beats
of four generations. But this master creator of a country's only native
songs has invariably here at home been apologized for as a sort of
'cornfield musician,' a mere banjo strummer, a hanger-on at barrooms where
minstrel quartets rendered his songs and sent the hat round. The reflection
will react upon his country; it will not detract from the real Foster when
the constructive critic appears to write his brief and unfortunate life. I
am not contending that he was a genius of the highest rank, although he had
the distinction that great genius nearly always achieves, of creating a
school that produced many imitators and established a place apart for
itself in the world's estimation. In ballad writing he did for the United
States what Watteau did for painting in France. As Watteau found a Flemish
school in France and left a French school stamped forever, so Foster found
the United States a home for imitations of English, Irish, German and
Italian songs, and left a native ballad form and melodic strain forever
impressed upon it as pure American.

"He was like Watteau in more than that. Watteau took the elegancies and
fripperies of the corrupt French court and fixed them in art immortal, as
if the moment had been arrested and held in actual motion. Foster took
the curious and melancholy spectacle of African slavery at its height,
superimposed by the most elegant and picturesque social manners this
country has known, at the moment the institution was at its zenith. He
saw the glamor, the humor, the tragedy, the contrasts, the emotional
depths--that lay unplumbed beneath it all. He fixed it there for all time,
for all hearts and minds everywhere. His songs are not only the pictorial