Two fluent writers had negro blood, Puschkin and Dumas. There may have been negro blood in Heredia, of _The Sonnets_. There may have been a trace of it in the ancestry of Hearne, whose mother was born on one of the islands south of Greece, across which tides of conquest for centuries drifted. The contrary indeed can not be proved. Negro blood influenced the brush of some of Spain’s greatest painters, and it may have been mingled in its Moorish poets. Is it not more than probable that it formed part of the racial inheritance of Matisse, Gauguin? There may have been a trace of negro blood in _El Poeta de America_, Darío, who is not so much poet of America as of the world, because of cosmopolitan training. An astonishing example of receptivity, he, who came from South America to France, and at one gulp swallowed, digested, the cultivation of Europe. In this receptivity I can think of but one parallel: Russian minds of the Eighteenth Century, like Lomonosov’s. It is too bad there is no good translation of Darío! Could square-toed Saxon reproduce such a poem as his _Aire Suave_ with its fluted, fairy-like fine-stepping? _Era un aire suave, de pausados giros; El hada Harmonia ritmaba sus vuelos; E iban frases vagas y tenues suspiros Entre los sollozes de los violoncelos._ It was a quarter of a century ago, I believe, that the part-negro poet of Venezuela, Mata, put out _Pentelicas_. Since, his output has been considerable, _Grito Bohemio_, _Idilio Tragico_. The last is called _Arias Sentimentales_. From this volume I quote a verse of the Nocturn: _Al tragico reproche de la sombra a la luz, la flor secreta de la esperanza recogio su broche, cual recoge su broche la violeta. La noche al fine, poeta! Poeta, al fin la noche!_ The years have made him gloomy. He is tragic, sad. He is a man of cultivation.