As we pass along life’s highway,
Day by day,
Thousands daily ask the question,
“What, I pray,
Tell me what’s the Negro doing?
And what course is he pursuing?
What achievements is he strewing
By the way?”
Many say he’s retrograding
Very fast;
Others say his glory’s fading,—
Cannot last;
That his prospects now are blighted,
That his chances have been slighted,
This his wrongs cannot be righted.
Time has passed.
Friends, lift up your eyes; look higher;
Higher still.
There’s the vanguard of our army
On the hill.
You’ve been looking at the rear guard.
Lift your eyes, look farther forward;
Thousands are still pressing starward—
Ever will.
IV. Roscoe C. Jamison
Roscoe C. Jamison was fortunate in leaving behind him a friend at his early death, some three years since, who treasured his fugitive verses sufficiently to gather them together, though but a handful, and send them out to the world in a little pamphlet. Fortunate also was he in another friend able to write his elegy:
Too soon is hushed his silver speech,
The music dies upon his lute,
The cadence falls beyond our reach;
Too soon the Poet’s lips are mute.
Roscoe C. Jamison
So wrote in this elegy, Lacrimae Aethiopiae, Charles Bertram Johnson, of this untimely dead singer. Hardly a score of poems are in this pamphlet, yet enough are here to reveal a poet in the making. Jamison was a better poet, even in these imperfect pieces, than many a writer of better verses. Here are the ardent impulses and here are the glowing ideas from which poetry of the higher order springs. The art, however, is undisciplined, grammar, metre, and rhymes are sometimes at fault. However, bold strokes of poetry atone, the effects are the effects of a real poet. Sometimes one finds in the small collection a poem that is all but perfect, a production that might have come from a maturer craftsman. I venture to put him to the test in the following poem: