isappointment of his yearnings have all but added one
more to the long list of those who died with their ambitions blasted
and their most ardent hopes defeated.

In 1854 appeared the first edition of _Poems on Miscellaneous
Subjects_, by Frances Ellen Watkins, commonly known as Mrs. Frances E.
W. Harper, who was for many years before the public and who is even
now remembered by many friends. Mrs. Harper was a woman of strong
personality and could read her poems to advantage. Her verse was very
popular, not less than ten thousand copies of her booklets being sold.
It was decidedly lacking in technique, however, and much in the style
of Mrs. Hemans. _The Death of the Old Sea King_, for instance, is in
the ballad style cultivated by this poet and Longfellow; but it is not
a well-sustained effort. Mrs. Harper was best when most simple, as
when in writing of children she said:

I almost think the angels
Who tend life's garden fair,
Drop down the sweet white blossoms
That bloom around us here.

The secret of her popularity is to be seen in such lines as the
following from _Bury me in a Free Land_:

Make me a grave where'er you will,
In a lowly plain or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth's humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.

I could not rest if around my grave
I heard the steps of a trembling slave:
His shadow above my silent tomb
Would make it a place of fearful gloom.

* * * * *

I ask no monument, proud and high,
To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.

Of the Emancipation Proclamation she wrote:

It shall flash through coming ages,
It shall light the distant years;
And eyes now dim with sorrow
Shall be brighter through their tears.

While Mrs. Harper was still prominently before the public appeared
Albery A. Whitman, a Methodist minister, whose important collection,
_Not a Man and Yet a Man_, appeared in 1877, and whose long and
ambitious poem, _Twasinta's Seminoles_, or _The Rape of Florida_ (the
latter title being the one most used), was issued in 1884. This writer
had great love for his work. In the preface to his second volume he
wrote of poetry as follows: "I do not believe poetry is on the
decline. I do not believe that human advancement extinguishes the
torch of sentiment. I can not think