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To the Black and Unknown Bards who gave to the world the priceless treasure of those "canticles of love and woe," the camp-meeting Spirituals; more particularly, to those untaught singers of the old plantations of the South, whose melodious lullabies to the babes of both races entered with genius-quickening power into the souls of Poe and Lanier, Dunbar and Cotter: to them, for whom any monument in stone or bronze were but mockery, I dedicate this monument of verse, budded by the children of their vision.
