The following expressions represent a summary of past judgments and criticism of negro spirituals.[2] The hymns of a congregation of "impassioned and impressible worshippers" have been "full of unpremeditated and irresistible dramatic power." Sung "with the weirdest intonations", they have indeed appeared "weird and intensely sad"--"such music, touching and pathetic, as I have never heard elsewhere", "with a mystical effect and passionate striving throughout the whole." And again, "Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and suffered, was his infinite longing and suffering uttered more plaintively." Besides being a relaxation to the negroes these quaint religious songs were "a stimulus to courage and a tie to heaven." Or again, "I remember that this minor-keyed pathos used to seem to me almost too sad to dwell upon, while slavery seemed destined to last for generations; but now that their patience has had its perfect work, history cannot afford to lose this portion of the record. There is no parallel instance of an oppressed race thus sustained by the religious sentiment alone. These songs are but the vocal expression of the simplicity of their faith and the sublimity of their long resignation." Such songs "are all valuable as an expression of the character and life of the race which is playing such a conspicuous part in our history. The wild, sad strains tell, as the sufferers themselves could, of crushed hope, keen sorrow and a dull, daily misery, which covered them as hopelessly as the fog from the rice swamps. On the other hand the words breathe a trusting faith in rest for the future to which their eyes seem constantly turned. The attitude is always the same, and, as a comment on the life of the race, is pathetic. Nothing but patience for this life--nothing but triumph for the next." "One can but feel that these quaint old spirituals with their peculiar melodies, having served their time with effectiveness, deserve a better fate than to sink into oblivion as unvalued and unrecorded examples of a bygone civilization." Many have thought that these songs would pass away immediately with the passing of slavery and that the old system of words and songs "could not be perpetuated without perpetuating slavery as it existed and with the fall of slavery its days were numbered." And "if they be found neither touching in sentiment, graceful in expression, nor well balanced in rhythm, they may at least possess interest as peculiarities of a system now no more forever in this country."