On the whole the plantation Negro's religion was a faithful copy of the white man's. It was content rather than the form which suffered sea change in the process of transmission from the white man to the black. What this content was, what new inflection and color the Negro slave imparted to the religious forms which he borrowed from his master we may, perhaps, gather from a study of the plantation hymns. These folksongs represent, at any rate, the naive and spontaneous utterance of hopes and aspirations for which the Negro slave had no other adequate means of expression. The first and most interesting account we have of these Negro spirituals is that of Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his _Army Life in a Black Regiment_.[10] He collected them from the lips of his own black soldiers as they sang them about the campfire at night. He was almost the first to recognize that these rude plantation hymns represented a real literature, the only literature the American Negro has produced, until very recent times. Col. Higginson has compared the Negro spirituals to the Scotch ballads and to the folk songs of other races. It is, however, not so much their similarities as their differences which are interesting and significant. Negro folk songs are ruder and more primitive. The verses, often but not always rhymed, are, as in the case of the example given below, composed almost entirely of single phrases, followed by a refrain, which is repeated again with slight modifications, ending, not infrequently, in an exclamation. An' I couldn't hear nobody pray, O Lord! Couldn't hear nobody pray. O--way down yonder By myself, I couldn't hear nobody pray. In the valley, Couldn't hear nobody pray, On my knees, Couldn't hear nobody pray, With my burden, Couldn't hear nobody pray, An' my Saviour, Couldn't hear nobody pray. O Lord! I couldn't hear nobody pray, O Lord! Couldn't hear nobody pray. O--way down yonder By myself, I couldn't hear nobody pray. Chilly waters, Couldn't hear nobody pray, In the Jordan, Couldn't hear nobody pray, Crossing over, Couldn't hear nobody pray, Into Canaan, Couldn't hear nobody pray.