Just then from the doorway, as fat as shotes, Came the cake-walk princes in their long red coats, Canes with a brilliant lacquer shine, And tall silk hats that were red as wine. And they pranced with their butterfly partners there, Coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair, Knee-skirts trimmed with the jessamine sweet, And bells on their ankles and little black feet. But it is the grotesque comedy of the American Negro, not the fantasia on Africa, that makes “The Congo” so entertaining a poem. The description of the “fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room” has often been quoted. There is the same feeling of “racket” in the picture of a religious camp meeting: A good old negro in the slums of the town Preached at a sister for her velvet gown; Howled at a brother for his low-down ways, His prowling, guzzling, sneak-thief days; Beat on the Bible till he wore it out Starting the jubilee revival shout. And some had visions as they stood on chairs, And sang of Jacob, and the golden stairs. And they all repented, a thousand strong, From their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong, And slammed on their hymn books till they shook the room With “glory, glory, glory,” And “Boom, boom, _Boom_.” Whatever qualities Mr. Lindsay lacks, he has humour, colour and gusto. When he writes in the tradition of the serious poets, as in “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight” and “Epilogue,” he is negligible: he is only one of a thousand capable verse-writers. He is dependent on his own idiom to a greater extent even than was Robert Burns. Not that his work in rag-time English is comparable in other respects to Burns’s in Scots. Burns’s themes were, apart from his comic verse, the traditional themes of the poets--the aristocrats of the spirit. Mr. Lindsay is a humorist and sentimentalist who is essentially a democrat of the spirit--one of the crowd. And, just as he is the humorist of the crowd, so is he the humorist of things immense and exaggerated. His imagination is the playground of whales and elephants and sea-serpents. He is happy amid the clangour and confusion of a railway-junction. He rejoices in the exuberant and titanic life of California, where: Thunder-clouds of grapes grow on the mountains. and he boasts that: There are ten gold suns in California, When all other lands have one, For the Golden Gate must have due light And persimmons be well done. And the hot whales slosh and cool in the wash And the fume of the hollow sea, Rally and roam in the loblolly foam And whoop that their souls are free.