A Guest at the Ludlow and Other Stories Part 17

"And O I wanted so To be felt sorry for!"

"Always suddenly they are gone, The friends we trusted and held secure."

"At utter loaf."

"Knee-deep in June."

--But I can not go on quoting forever.

Technically, Mr. Riley is a master of surpa.s.sing finish. His meters are perfect and varied. They flow as smoothly as his own Indiana streams.

His rimes are almost never imperfect. To prove his own understanding he has written one _scherzo_ in technic that is a delightful example of bad rime, bad meter, and the other earmarks of the poor poet. It is "Ezra House," and begins:

"Come listen, good people, while a story I do tell Of the sad fate of one I knew so pa.s.sing well!"

The "do" and the "so" are the unfailing index of crudity. Then we have rimes like "long" and "along" (it is curious that modern English is the only tongue that finds this repet.i.tion objectionable); "moon" and "tomb," "well" and "hill," and "said" and "denied" are others, and the whole thing is an enchanting lesson in How Poetry Should Not be Written.

Mr. Riley is fond of dividing words at the ends of lines, but always in a comic way, though Horace, you remember, was not unwilling to use it seriously, as in his

"----U- Xorius amnis."

Mr. Riley's animadversions on "Addeliney Bowersox" const.i.tute a fascinating study in this effect. He is also devoted to dividing an adjective from its noun by a line-end. This is a trick of Poe's, whose influence Mr. Riley has greatly profited by. In his dialect poetry Mr.

Riley gets just the effect of the jerky drawl of the Hoosier by using the end of a line as a knife, thus:

"The wood's Green again, and sun feels good's June!"

His masterly use of the caesura is notable, too. See its charming despotism in "Griggsby Station."

But it is not his technic that makes him ambrosial, not the loving care _ad unguem_ that smooths the uncouthest dialect into lilting tunefulness without depriving it of its colloquial verisimilitude--it is none of these things of mechanical inspiration, but the spirit of the man, his democracy, his tenderness, the health and wealth of his sympathies. If he uses "memory" a little too often as a vehicle for his rural pictures, the utter charm of the pictures is atonement enough. He has caught the real American. He is the laureate of the bliss of laziness. His child poems are the next best thing to the child itself; they have all the infectious essence of gayety, and all the _navete_, and all the knife-like appeal. It could not reasonably be demanded that his prose should equal the perfection of his verse, but nothing more eerie has ever been done than the little story, "Where is Mary Alice Smith?" with its strange use of rime at the end.

Of all dialect writers he has been the most versatile. Think of the author of "The Raggedy Man" or "Orphant Annie" writing one of the finest sonnets in the language! this one which I must quote here as a n.o.ble ending to my halt praise:

"Being his mother, when he goes away I would not hold him overlong, and so Sometimes my yielding sight of him grows O So quick of tears, I joy he did not stay To catch the faintest rumor of them! Nay, Leave always his eyes clear and glad, although Mine own, dear Lord, do fill to overflow;

"Let his remembered features, as I pray, Smile ever on me. Ah! what stress of love Thou givest me to guard with Thee thiswise: Its fullest speech ever to be denied Mine own--being his mother! All thereof Thou knowest only, looking from the skies As when not Christ alone was crucified."

Life is the more tolerable, the more full of learned sympathy, and thereby of joy and value, for the very existence of such a man.