The body of the Rhymes, here and there, carries many facts between the lines, well worth knowing.
This collection also will shed some light on how the Negro managed to go through so many generations "in slavery and still come out" with a bright, capable mind. There were no colleges or schools for them, but there were Folk Rhymes, stories, Jubilee songs, and Nature; they used these and kept mentally fit.
I now approach the more difficult and probably the most important portion of my discussion in the Study of Negro Folk Rhymes. It is a discussion that I would have willingly omitted, had I not thought that some one owed it to the world. Seeing a debt, as I thought, and not seeing another to pay
it, I have reluctantly undertaken to discharge the obligation.
If I were so fortunate as to possess a large flower garden with many new and rare genera and species, and wished to acquaint my friends with them, I should first take these friends for a walk through the garden, that they might see the odd tints and hues, might inhale a little of the new fragrance, and might get some idea as to the prospects for the utilization of these new plants in the world. Then, taking these friends back to my study room, I should consider in a friendly manner along with them, the Families and the Species, and the varieties. Finally, I should endeavor to lay before them from whence these new and strange flowers came. I have endeavored to pursue this method in my discussion of the Negro Folk Rhymes. In the foregoing I have endeavored to take the friendly reader for a walk through this new and strange garden of Rhymes, and I now extend an invitation to him to come into the Study Room for a more critical view of them.
When one enters upon the slightest contemplation of Negro Folk Rhyme classification, and is kind-hearted enough to dignify them with a claim to kinship to real poetry, the word Ballad rolls out without the slightest effort, as a term that takes them all
in. Yes, this is very true, but they are of a strange type indeed. They are Nature Ballads, many of them, in the sense as ordinarily used. In quite another sense, however, from that in which Nature Ballad is ordinarily used, about all Folk Rhymes are Nature Ballads.
I do not have reference to the thought content, but have reference to what I term Nature Ballads in form. Permit me to explain by analogy just what I would convey by the term Nature Ballad in form.
All Nature is one. Though we arbitrarily divide Nature's objects for study, they are indissolubly bound together and every part carries in some part of its constitution some well defined marks which characterize the other parts with which it has no immediate connection. To illustrate: the absolutely pure sapphire, pure aluminic oxide, crystallized, is commonly colorless, but we know that Nature's most beautiful sapphires are not colorless, but are blue, and of other beautiful tints. These color tints are due to minutest traces of other substances, not at all of general common sapphire composition. We call them all sapphires, however, regardless of their little impurities which are present to enhance their charm and beauty. Likewise, all animal life begins with one cell, and though the one cell in one case develops
into a vertebrate, and in another case into an invertebrate the cells persist and so all animal life has cellular structure in common. Yet, each animal branch has predominant traits that distinguish it from all other branches. This same thing is true of plants.