And it is the publishers themselves who challenge for this volume a comparison with “The Souls of Black Folk,” which was published by McClurg in 1903. It is regrettable that they should force the issue, for “The Souls of Black Folk” is a greater book than “Darkwater” in many ways. In the first place, its high standard of craftsmanship is maintained through every chapter and page. There are no fag-ends, as in the chapter “Of Beauty and Death” in the present volume, where the rhetoric bogs down, the author loses the thread of his purpose and goes spieling off into space, spinning a series of incongruous purple patches whose tawdry glitter shows the same reversion to crude barbarism in taste which leads a Florida fieldhand to don opal-colored trousers, a pink tie, pari-colored shirt and yellow shoes. Artistically, that chapter is an awful thing, and I trust that the author is artist enough to be ashamed of it. And, though it may savor of anti-climax, “The Souls of Black Folk” was more artistically “gotten” up—to use the grammar of its author. “Darkwater” is cheaply bound and cheaply printed on paper which is almost down to the level of the Seaside Library. Neither in mechanical nor mental quality does the book of 1920 come up to the level of that of 1903. Yet, in spite of some defects, “Darkwater” (with the exception of chapters six, seven, eight and nine) is a book well worth reading. It is a collection of papers written at different times, between 1908 and 1920, and strung loosely on the string of race. One wishes that the author could have included his earlier essay on The Talented Tenth and his address on the aims and ideals of modern education, delivered some twelve years ago to the colored school children of Washington, D. C. Each paper makes a separate chapter, and each chapter is followed by a rhetorical sprig of symbolism in prose or verse in which the tone-color of the preceding piece is made manifest to the reader. Of these tone-poems in prose and verse, the best are the Credo; A Litany at Atlanta; The Riddle of the Sphinx, and Jesus Christ in Texas. In these the lyrical quality of the author’s prose is lifted to high levels. In these elegance does not slop over into turgid declamation and rhetorical claptrap—which has become a common fault of the author’s recent prose as shown in The Crisis. In this, the first part of the book, the work is genuine and its rhetoric rings true. Nevertheless, the sustained artistic swing of “The Souls of Black Folk,” which placed that work (as a matter of form and style) on the level of Edgar Saltus’ _Imperial Purple_—this is not attained in “Darkwater.”