igure,--and said quite audibly to his friends, "Quite
interesting--looks intelligent,--yes--yes!"

Fortunate was Coleridge-Taylor to be born in Europe and to speak a
universal tongue. In America he could hardly have had his career. His
genius was, to be sure, recognized (with some palpitation and
consternation) when it came full-grown across the seas with an English
imprint; but born here, it might never have been permitted to grow. We
know in America how to discourage, choke, and murder ability when it so
far forgets itself as to choose a dark skin. England, thank God, is
slightly more civilized than her colonies; but even there the path of
this young man was no way of roses and just a shade thornier than that
of whiter men. He did not complain at it,--he did not

"Wince and cry aloud."

Rather the hint here and there of color discrimination in England
aroused in him deeper and more poignant sympathy with his people
throughout the world. He was one with that great company of
mixed-blooded men: Pushkin and Dumas, Hamilton and Douglass, Browning
and many others; but he more than most of these men knew the call of the
blood when it came and listened and answered. He came to America with
strange enthusiasm. He took with quite simple and unconscious grace the
conventional congratulations of the musical world. He was used to that.
But to his own people--to the sad sweetness of their voices, their
inborn sense of music, their broken, half-articulate voices,--he leapt
with new enthusiasm. From the fainter shadowings of his own life, he
sensed instinctively the vaster tragedy of theirs. His soul yearned to
give voice and being to this human thing. He early turned to the sorrow
songs. He sat at the faltering feet of Paul Laurence Dunbar and he asked
(as we sadly shook our heads) for some masterpiece of this world-tragedy
that his soul could set to music. And then, so characteristically, he
rushed back to England, composed a half-dozen exquisite harmonies
haunted by slave-songs, led the Welsh in their singing, listened to the
Scotch, ordered great music festivals in all England, wrote for Beerbohm
Tree, took on another music professorship, promised a trip to Germany,
and at last, staggering home one night, on his way to his wife and
little boy and girl, fell in his tracks and in four days was dead, at
the age of thirty-seven. They say that in his death-throe he arose and
facing some great, ghostly choir raised his last bat