, and when we cannot walk we will crawl!" We
have never read but one story that approaches this narrative of Mr.
Stanley, and that was the tender devotion of Ruth to her
mother-in-law. We read it in the Hebrew to Dr. O.S. Stearns of Newton,
Mass.; and confess that, though it has been many years since, the
blessed impression still remains, and our confidence in humanity is
strengthened thereby.

Here are a few white men in the wilds of Africa, surrounded by the
uncivilized children of the desert. They have money and valuable
instruments, a large variety of gewgaws that possessed the power of
charming the fancy of the average savage; and therefore the whites
would have been a tempting prey to the blacks. But not a hair of their
head was harmed. The white men had geographical fame to encourage them
in the struggle,--friends and loved ones far away beyond the
beautiful blue sea. These poor savages had nothing to steady their
purposes save a paltry sum of money as day-wages,--no home, no
friends; and yet they were as loyal as if a throne were awaiting them.
No, no! nothing waited on their heroic devotion to a magnificent cause
but a lonely death when they had brought the "master" to the sea. When
their stomachs, pinched by hunger; when their limbs, stiff from
travel; when their eyes, dim with the mists of death; when every vital
force was slain by an heroic ambition to serve the great Stanley; when
the fires of endeavor were burnt to feeble embers,--then, and only
then, would these faithful Negroes fail in the fulfilment of their
mission, so full of peril, and yet so grateful to them, because it was
in the line of _duty_.

Cicero urged virtue as necessary to effective oratory. The great
majority of Negroes in Africa are both orators and logicians. A people
who have such noble qualities as this race seems to possess has, as a
logical necessity, the poetic element in a large degree.

In speaking of Negro poetry, we shall do so under three different
heads; viz., the _Epic_, _Idyllic_, _Religious_, or miscellaneous.

_The epic poetry_ of Africa, so far as known, is certainly worthy of
careful study. The child must babble before it can talk, and all
barbarians have a sense of the sublime in speech. Mr. Taine, in his
"History of English Literature," speaking of early Saxon poetry,
says,--

"One poem nearly whole, and two or three fragments, are all
that remain of this lay-poetry of England. The rest of the
pa