-THE FAITH OF~ THE PEOPLES POET DANIEL L, MARSH THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET JAMES WHITCOMB II ILK Y The People's Poet THE FAITH of the PEOPLE'S POET DANIEL L. MARSH D27 INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS COPYRIGHT 1920 TH BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY Printed in the United State* of America WAUNWORTH A CO. OOK UANUFACTUIKR* AOOKLVN. N. r. THE AUTHOR AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATES THIS BOOK TO HIS WIFE HARRIET TRUXELL MARSH 1003327 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I THE PEOPLE'S POET . . .. ^ . >, 11 II THE FAITH OF JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY 38 III "His VOICE MAKES NATIVE CHOICE OF NATURE'S HARMONY" ..... 58 IV THE DOCTRINE OF GOD IN RILEY'S RHYMES . . . 106 V THE CHRIST IN RILEY'S RHYMES A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION ....._ 135 VI THE CROSS IN RILEY'S RHYMES A PAS SION WEEK MEDITATION . A .. . 145 VII SIN ......... ... . 156 VIII RILEY'S DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY AN EASTER MEDITATION 177 IX PRACTICAL RELIGION HUMBLE SERVICE 205 X PATRIOTISM IN RILEY'S RHYMES . 230 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET CHAPTER I THE PEOPLE'S POET ONCE upon a Chautauqua platform I delivered a lecture-recital entitled "James Whitcomb Riley, Our Typical American Poet." At the close of the lecture-recital, a preacher who was present said to me : "I do not agree with your subject. I do not think that James Whitcomb Riley is the 'typical American poet/ " In my reply I insisted that while he wrote for the human heart the world around, yet he was thor oughly American in his heredity, his residence, his themes and his habits of thought. "With all of this, I will agree," responded my critic; "but still I do not think your subject is true.'* "In what particular?" I inquired. 11 12 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET "Simply because I do not consider him a poet at all," was the rejoinder. "Pray, then, what is he?" I asked. "Oh," he replied, "just a rhymster just a rhym- ster. I like to think of a poet as one who deals with the great profound things of life in a profound way. Now Riley's stuff is simple, shallow, flung off in a hurry. I would not call him a poet at all." I report this only because it is so thoroughly ex ceptional. Out of the tens of thousands of people before whom I have spoken on Riley, that is the only time I have ever heard anybody raise a doubt about his enduring poethood ; and thus, by striking contrast, the genuineness of my thesis is demon strated, that James Whitcomb Riley is the typical American poet of this generation. And yet, my preacher friend gave voice to a very common heresy: that anything that is simple and easily understood is not profound and has not re quired much work. People often imagine that any thing that is abstruse and involved and difficult to be seen through is the product of great labor and pro found thought. But did you ever stop to think that when you can not see to the bottom of a stream, it is not necessar- THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 13 ily because it is so deep: maybe it is just muddy! It requires far more work and far more brains to express a profound truth simply than to enshroud it in the vagueness of high-sounding phrases. Riley mastered the magic secret of poetry: sim plicity! He steered clear of choriambics and hen- decasyllabic verse. That is one reason why he is the People's Poet. But in his simple style he dealt with the profoundest thoughts of life. What are the profoundest thoughts of life? God, man, sin, conscience, immortality, patriotism, nature. Did Riley deal with these subjects in a profound way? In answer I ask only that you read the following chapters of this book. But his simple verses were not "just flung off." For the most part they are the result of assiduous toil. He told me once when I called on him in his home in Lockerbie Street, Indianapolis, that he had always done his best work at night, after the rest of the household had retired and he locked his door and worked alone. He said that sometimes he worked for a whole night on a single line of poetry. Once he remarked to a friend that he had always done more work with the rubber end of his pencil than with the point of it ! It is well for young peo- 14 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET pie to be told that story; for excellence never lies this side of drudgery. Pope knew what he was talk ing about when he said : "Pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep." The magic and the mystery of the poet is to trans figure life and its environment, under the stimulus of emotion and prophetic insight. To be a poem, this transfiguring speech must flow in measured pulse and conform to a definite word-pattern. This throbbing pulse-beat which we call rhythm is as essentially the life of the poem as is the coursing warm blood the life of the body. Everywhere in the universe there is rhythm: the swinging of the stars in their eternal orbits without variation; the succession of the seasons; the beating of the waves upon the beach; the throbbing of our own hearts. The rhythmic march lightens the pack upon the sol dier's back, and the rhythmic movement gives pleas ure to the folk-dancer. Likewise, whatever may be the source of the poet's emotion, his verse moves to an accordant rhythm, imparting to the hearer its own energy and stirring him with a kindred emo tion. Note how true this is of the quick unbending THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 15 march of Homer's dactylic hexameters, narrating the achievements of heroes; of the majestic flow o.f Milton's iambic pentameter, disclosing a drama of Heaven and hell; of the stately soaring flight of Bryant's Waterfowl; of the quickening, throbbing roll of Riley's "The Drum" : "O the drum ! There is some Intonation in thy grum Monotony of utterance that strikes the spirit dumb, As we hear, Through the clear And unclouded atmosphere, Thy palpitating syllables roll in upon the ear I "There's a part Of the art Of thy music-throbbing heart That thrills a something in us that awakens with a start, And in rhyme With the chime And exactitude of time, Goes marching on to glory to thy melody sublime." These are only the first two stanzas. Read the entire poem aloud and see if your emotions are not stirred the same as if you were listening to the roll of the drum at the head of a column of marching soldiers that carry the old flag by! 16 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET Have you ever been walking along a country road when a shower of rain came up, and do you recall the rhythmic soft sound of the patter of the rain drops in the dust? You can hear it again in a stanza from that universally popular ballad of Riley's, "Out to Old Aunt Mary's": "It all comes back so clear to-day! Though I am as bald as you are gray,^ Out by the barn-lot and down the lane We patter along in the dust again, As light as the tips of the drops of the rain, Out to Old Aunt Mary's." And you can not read the following two lines from "When the Frost Is On the Punkin" without hear ing the hiss-swiss-siss-rasping sound of frosted blades of corn or of fallen autumn leaves as you wade through them : "The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn, And the raspin' of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn." Neither can you read aloud the following two lines without hearing the ticking of a clock : "O, it sets my hart a-clickin', like the tickin' of a clock, When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock." In all of Riley's poetry the rhythm is faultless. THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 17 But it takes more than rhythm to make a poem. Mechanically speaking, the musical charm of all good poetry depends upon the subtle but natural ad justment of all other formal elements with this regu lating and harmonizing effect of meter. Words are the only medium of expression available to a poet. A musician works with tone, a sculptor with form, and a painter with color ; but a poet must work with words. Once, so a story goes, an inquisitive friend said to Mr. Riley : "I understand you are now getting a dollar a word for your poetry. Is that so?" When Riley confirmed the rumor, the inquisitive friend continued : "Pretty easy money, isn't it?" To which the poet replied: "It is if you can find the right word !" Words have a certain sensuous value in them selves. When they are used by a poet as instru ments of beauty, they add the element of melody to the rhythmic structure of a poem. The simplest method by which this tonal quality is secured is rhyme, which is the correspondence in two or more words or lines of terminal sounds beginning with an accented vowel, preceded by different consonant 18 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET sounds, as, for example, "folds" and "golds," "pets" and "lets," "spill" and "sill," etc., in Riley's "A Fruit Piece" : "The afternoon of summer folds Its warm arms round the marigolds. "And, with its gleaming fingers, pets The watered pinks and violets "That from the casement vases spill Over the cottage window-sill, "Their fragrance down the garden walks Where droop the dry-mouthed hollyhocks." Another part of the melodic element is allitera tion, which is the repetition of the same letter or sound in two or more words in the same line. To make good poetry, alliteration must never be forced or strained after ; it must be so natural that you do not know it is there until you stop to hunt for it, as the recurring 'W in this line from "A Tale of the Airly Days" : "Tell me a tale of the timber-lands,"-H or the two ";V' in tnis line from "O ut to Mary's" : THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 19 "The jelly the jam and the marmalade," or the two 'W and three "p's" in this line : "And the sweet-sour pickles of peach and pear." It is really a fine art to know how to use alliteration without making it appear to be striven for and Riley has mastered the art. Another mark of good poetry, so far as the emo tional and sensuous appeal is concerned, is an abun dant use of the most musical letters of the alphabet, namely, "//' "m" and "n." But here again the use must not be forced; it must be so natural that we revel in the sweet music of the poetry without hav ing these mellifluous consonants obtrude themselves upon our notice. Here, also, Riley has succeeded. As an illustration of this, require yourself to observe the use he has made of "//' "m" and "n" in the fol lowing stanza from "Out to Old Aunt Mary's" : "And the old spring-house, in the cool green gloom Of the willow trees, and the cooler room Where the swinging shelves and the crocks were kept, Where the cream in a golden languor slept, While the waters gurgled and laughed and wept Out to Old Aunt Mary's." The foregoing stanza is also a good illustration of tone-color, a subtle quality which suggests the 20 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET meaning of words by the sound and value of their syllables, as: "The old spring-house, in the cool green gloom," or "Where the cream in a golden languor slept," where the slow change in vowel quality produces a feeling in one like looking at that part of a picture where the shade gradually blends with the light. Truly, measured by all these standards, Riley is a poet. But poetry is more than the painfully exact lan guage of the class-room; it is the free, capricious melody of nature. It is more than the thought-out music of the head; it is one uninterrupted voluntary of the heart. It is more than rhyme and jingling sensibilities and measure and cadence; it is the ap plication of ideas to life. Life and poetry belong together. When they are divorced, poetry becomes artificial and anaemic, and life becomes sordid and dull. Mr. Riley's work stands out preeminently because of its naturalness, exuberance, vitality and sincerity. It is always spirited, fresh, original and full of the sap of life. His poems are the "genuine article," as we would say in the parlance of the THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 21 street, or "The Ginoine Ar-tickle," as he calls it in the Hoosier dialect: "Talkin' o' poetry, There're few men yit 'At's got the stuff b'iled down so's it'll pour Out sorgum-like, and keeps a year and more Jes' sweeter ever' time you tackle it! Why, all the jinglin' truck 'at hes been writ Fer twenty year and better is so pore You cain't find no sap in it any more 'N you'd find juice in puff-balls ! AND I'D QUIT! What people wants is facts, I apperhend; And naked Natur is the thing to give Your writin' bottom, eh? And I contend 'At honest work is allus bound to live. Now them's my views ; 'cause you kin recommend Sich poetry as that from end to end." But not only is he a poet, he is the Poet of the People. His poems stand the final test of the mil lions. He has endeared himself to a wider range of humanity than any other American poet. Our most popular poets before him were Longfellow and Whittier, and their most popular poems were "Hia watha" and "Snow-Bound." But neither one was ever read by a tithe of the people who read any num ber of Riley's rhymes. Where one person on a beautiful June day will quote the opening line of Lowell's "Vision of Sir Launfal," a dozen people 22 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET will be talking about Riley's "Knee-Deep in June/' and on a keen frosty autumn morning it seems as though everybody one meets were familiar with "When the Frost is on the Punkin and the Fodder's in the Shock." In any unselected group of Amer icans, read the titles of the best-known poems of any dozen poets you please, including among them Riley's "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," and have the people vote by ballot the poem with which they are most familiar, and it is a safe guess that an over whelming majority will vote "An Old Sweetheart of Mine." The responsive tenderness of his heart has won lettered and unlettered, rich and poor, high and low, because it finds its way over the fruitful levels where men are equal. He has glorified the emo tions, sorrows, struggles and triumphs of those who live and toil, love and are true. He has become the Poet Laureate of the People, not by any royal de cree but by the common consent and judgment of his countrymen. He is a bard of the old line of the line of Burns, Shelley and Poe. The immortal spirit of song that moves with the race, singing of the things that it THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 23 loves, was truly in James Whitcomb Riley. Shel ley says that "Poets are the hierophants of unappre- hended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present." Possessors of this spirit of song are all one tribe, whether they be harpers among the herdsmen, prophets in the presence of kings, minstrels or trou badours, ballad pedlers or poet laureates. They are a tribe to which is bequeathed the honor and glory of preserving whatever is fine and worth while in the spirit of the times. Superficial people think that Riley's verses are intensely local; they dismiss them as provincial. But they are no more provincial than are the poems of honey-lipped Theocritus who sang at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus sixteen hundred years be fore Riley sang among the farmsteads of Indiana. There is no apparent polish about our Poet of the People, and yet even his most idiomatic and uncouth Hoosier dialect verses describe relations of men, emotions of men, yearnings of men, beliefs of men that are common to the race. Nothing human is foreign to him. There is something spacious and robust in his humanity, something that gives it a 24 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET truly Elizabethan tone. He combines, in a most un usual degree, the homespun phrase with the lyric feeling. The love of a man for a maid is a theme that has remained unchanged, unhackneyed, inexhaustible. The sentiment that was felt by Daphnis and Chloe is the same that breathes through Riley's "Farmer Whipple Bachelor." We love its humanness and its homely sincerity : "I remember onc't in harvest, when the 'cradle-in' ' was done, (When the harvest of my summers mounted up to twenty- one), I was ridin' home with Mary at the closin' o' the day A-chawin' straws and thinkin', in a lover's lazy way!" One reason why he is so popular is because he is so thoroughly real. His realm is on the unclouded confines of the natural, the genuine, the true, and there he delights to surround himself with images of beauty and of sweet confidence, to plant his homes and fields and flower gardens in a day upon which the sun should ever shine. He is real that is the reason why men read him and love him. He wraps round all of his poems the atmosphere of per fect reality. And therefore, in "The Rhymes of Ironquill" he has truly pictured the way in which THE FAITH OP THE PEOPLE'S POET 25 many common Americans have received his own poems. The man professed that he did not care for poetry; but his wife brought home a volume of these poems which were true to nature, and well, let Riley tell it : "And then she made me read the thing, And found my specs and all: And I jest leant back there i jingl My cheer ag'inst the wall And read and read, and read and read, All to myse'f ontil I lit the lamp and went to bed With Rhymes of Ironquill! "I propped myse'f up there, and durn! I never shet an eye Till daylight! hogged the whole concern Tee-total, mighty nigh! I'd sigh sometimes, and cry sometimes, Er laugh jest fit to kill Clean captured-like with them-air rhymes O' that-air Ironquill !" His analytical subtlety, meticulousness, refinement of reasoning, and propriety and power of language the good faith with which he manages the evoca tion and exhibition of his real and common and at tractive creations enables him to meet and master every mood of his readers, so that people who would 26 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET think it a mark of weakness to be caught reading any poetry at all, and especially poems of sentiment, do read any number of Riley's rhymes, and cry over his poems of sentiment. Take, for example, "Thet- Air Young-Un," which tells the story of a little boy who loved to wander along the mill stream, who loved nature and was always wondering what the water was talking of, and one day they missed him, and oh, tears blind us, for it is the story of the universal father of all little children who have passed out of sight beyond the River of Death : "Found his hat 'way down below Hinchman's Ford. 'Ves' Anders he Rid and fetched it. Mother she Went wild over that, you know Hugged it! kissed it! Turribul! My hopes then was all gone too. . . . Brung him in, with both hands full O' warter-lilies 'peared-like new- Bloomed fer him renched whiter still In the clear rain, mixin' fine And finer in the noon sunshine. . . ." Provincial? Oh, no! He conjured situations that might have arisen in Sicily sixteen hundred years ago or in Judea four thousand years ago ; and which will keep on recurring as long as human be- THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 2 ings shall inhabit the earth. He dug beneath the problems of the passing day for his inspiration. The tears in his verse are for the common heartaches of humanity. He wraps this universality of appeal in an atmosphere of perfect reality. Look at "Nothin' to Say" with this in mind : You can feel the utter loneliness of the old man who has an only daughter, and she wants to get married, and she has come to ask her father whether he has any objection, and it makes the heartbroken old man yearn for her mother who has been dead these many years, and he feels that he can not give his daughter up, yet he does not want to interfere with her happiness, so with a loving sob he repeats over and over, "Nothin' to say" : "Nothin' to say, my daughter ! Nothin' at all to say ! Gyrls that's in love, I've noticed, giner'ly has their way! Yer mother did, afore you, when her folks objected to me Yit here I am and here you air! and yer mother where is she? "You look lots like yer mother : purty much same in size ; And about the same complected ; and favor about the eyes : Like her, too, about livin' here, because she couldn't stay; It'll 'most seem like you was dead like her ! but I hain't got nothin' to say. 28 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET "She left you her little Bible writ yer name acrost the page And left her ear-bobs f er you, ef ever you come of age ; I've alluz kep' 'em and gyuarded 'em, but ef yer goin' away Nothin' to say, my daughter ! Nothin' at all to say ! "You don't rickollect her, I reckon? No: you wasn't a year old then! And now yer how old air you? Wy, child, not 'twenty'! When? And yer nex' birthday's in Aprile? and you want to git mar ried that day? I wisht yer mother was livin' 1 but I hain't got nothin' to say I "Twenty year 1 and as good a gyrl as parent ever found ! There's a straw ketched on to yer dress there I'll bresh it off turn round. (Her mother was jes' twenty when us two run away.) Nothin' to say, my daughter ! Nothin' at all to say I" It is this universality of appeal that has made Riley so beloved. The laughter in his verse is not at the broad Rabelaisian humor of some passing Hoosier barnyard joke; it is rather the whimsical humor that is the common chuckle of humanity a humor which no man with any sense of humor would ever try to define. His humor is unsophisti cated. It is not the glittering epigram nor the sting ing social satire that delights him, but the homely characterization, the humor of childhood, the jest that is agreeable through its piquancy, as "The Old Tramp" : THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 29 "A' old Tramp slep' in our stable wunst, An' the Raggedy Man he caught An' roust him up, an' chased him off Clean out through our back lot! "An' the old Tramp hollered back an' said, 'You're a purty man ! You air ! With a pair o' eyes like two fried eggs, An' a nose like a Bartlutt pear !' " The quintessence of humor is the element of sur prise. Riley has it. His humor is elfish. In such a poem as "The Flying Islands of the Night" he gives free rein to his fondness for the bizarre and the odd in coining words and images. But his humor is always kindly. There is never any sting in it. There is never any sting in anything he writes. Once "To a Poet-Critic" he wrote: "Yes, the bee sings I confess it Sweet as honey Heaven bless it! Yit he'd be a sweeter singer Ef he didn't have no stinger." He is a thoroughly wholesome poet. It was his proud boast that he had never written a line that could not be read by any person or anywhere. His training to be the People's Poet was good, not only while he studied in the public school or the 30 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET Greenfield Academy or his father's law office; but more particularly in his childhood home, "A simple old frame house eight rooms in all Set just one side the center of a small But very hopeful Indiana town," and wandering sun-tanned and bare-footed "Up and Down Old Brandywine" creek, plunging into the "Old Swimmin' Hole," wandering at will across richly scented clover fields, through the hazel thickets, "And then in the dust of the road again ; And the teams we met, and the countrymen ; And the long highway, with sunshine spread As thick as butter on country bread, Our cares behind, and our hearts ahead Out to Old Aunt Mary's" ; or as a young man bowling over the country with a patent medicine show, or painting signs, or loaf ing with farmers, or reporting for a country news paper, learning the little tragedies and comedies of our common life which he later wove with such marvelous skill into his poems, and mastering also the Hoosier dialect which became music upon his lips. As he said of Lewis D. Hayes when he died, so we say of Riley : THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 31 "Though he knew Man's force and his purpose, As strong as his strongest peers, He knew, as well, the kindly heart, And the tenderness of tears." He read omnivorously. He knew about the sor rows of the Greek gods, and the stories of the heroes of old, and the problems of other ages; but the poems he has written are the sort of poems Theocritus would write if he were living in Indiana to-day. "How," asks Carlyle in his Essay on Burns, "How does the poet speak to men with power but by being still more a man than they?" That fits Riley. Once, in accepting his poem entitled, "In Swimming-Time," the editor of the Century Mag&- zine wrote Mr. Riley as follows: "I must say that there is nobody at present writing who seems, to me, to get so much of genuine human nature in a short space, as you do." If you think this is too strong, read the following lines picked from the middle of his poem on "A Pen-Pictur' of a Cert'in Friwolus Old Man" : " 'Oh I' he says, 'to wake and be Barefoot, in the airly dawn In the pastur' ! thare,' says he, 'Standin' whare the cow's slep' on 32 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET The cold, dewy grass that's got Print of her jest steamy hot Fer to warm a feller's heels In a while ! How good it feels !' " If you were not brought up on a farm you will not be able to appreciate that, and if you were brought up on a farm no comment is necessary. He was a man of the common people. He knew poverty. He knew what it was to struggle fiercely, tragically, for existence. He knew what it was to have the world turn its cold shoulder on him. He knew the sadness and disappointment of seeing the flowers he plucked turn to ashes in his hands. More than once he felt baffled and almost beaten in life's fierce battle. Later he became well-to-do, rich in deed, from his lectures and the royalty on his books. He was lionized and feted by the great ones of earth. Honors were showered upon him. But the money and fame that came to him added nothing to his inspiration, nothing to his happiness. He was still the Poet of the People, faithfully revealing human nature. In "Down to the Capital," he nar rates the story of two men who had been chums in their young manhood in Indiana. The one had be come rich and was now a Congressman at Washing- THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 33 ton. The other was a poor old soldier who had gone to Washington to call on his old friend and get him to- secure a pension for him. The poor man returns home, and is telling his neighbors about his visit about the fine home that his old friend has, and about a reception that was given in it, and then how the rich man crept out with the poor man, and be moaned the artificiality of his high-priced life: " 'And all I want, and could lay down and sob fer, is to know The homely things of homely life; fer instance, jes' to go And set down by the kitchen stove Lord ! that 'u'd rest me so, Jes' set there, like I ust to do, and laugh and joke, you know. " 'Jes' set there, like I ust to do,' says Fluke, a-startin' in ; 'Peared-like, to say the whole thing over to hisse'f ag'in; Then stopped and turned, and kind o' coughed, and stooped and fumbled fer Somepin' o' 'nuther in the grass I guess his handicercher. "Well, sence I'm back from Washington, where I left Fluke a-still A-leggin' fer me, heart and soul, on that-air pension bill, I've half-way struck the notion, when I think o' wealth and sich, They's nothin' much patheticker'n jes' a-bein' rich!" It is because his song is so human that the com mon people hear him gladly and so do the masters of literature. His poems will stand as an expres- sion of the tastes and qualities of the people of this age. His personality loves the cheery and hopeful things, clings to simplicity, discovers the quaintly humorous near at hand, and sings life's pathos with compassion, a home-keeping and home-loving poet, depending upon common sights and sounds for his inspirations, and engrossed with the significance of facts. He wants what the people want, "Somep'n Common-Like" : "Somep'n 'at's common-like, and good And plain, and easy understood ; Somep'n 'at folks like me and you Kin understand, and relish, too, And find some sermint in 'at hits The spot, and sticks and benefits. "We don't need nothin' extry fine; 'Cause, take the run o' minds like mine. And we'll go more on good horse-sense Than all your flowery eloquence; And we'll jedge best of honest acts By Nature's statement of the facts. "So when you're wantin' to express Your misery, er happiness, Er anything, 'at's wuth the time O' telling in plain talk er rhyme Jes' sort o' let your subject run As ef the Lord wuz listenun." THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 35 That is the kind of poetry he wrote, and that is the kind of man he was. A defect of character in many otherwise great people is egotism. It has been called a "respectable" sin, but the qualifying adjective does not make it any less a sin. Mr. Riley has wonderfully drawn his own picture, uncon sciously, in certain words that he records of Eras mus Wilson. Those of us who know Erasmus Wilson know that they fit him, too. Our poet com mends him for his modesty, humility and natural ness all of them great qualities and all of them marks of the real man. As what we speak of as "common sense" is generally the most uncommon commodity in any community, so also a common man, the kind we like and the kind the Poet of the People was, is really very uncommon, indeed : "You're common, as I said afore You're common, yit oncommon more.- You allus kindo' 'pear, to me, What all mankind had ort to be Jest natchurl, and the more hurraws You git, the less you know the cause Like as ef God Hisse'f stood by, Where best on earth hain't half knee-high, And seein' like, and knowin' He 'S the Only Grate Man really, You're jest content to size your hight With any feller man's in sight. " 36 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET Big, kind, modest Erasmus Wilson, to whom Riley inscribed the poem from which the above lines are taken, once after the whole country had joined in celebrating Riley's birthday, spoke of him as follows : i "As the poet is one who sees and can tell, our poet is one who sees clearly things that are dim and hazy to us ; senses distinctly things that are vague dreams to us, and carries us to joyous heights where we cannot climb alone. Truly he is our prophet re vealing life to us. "The fact that so very many of us read Riley proves that he is our sort of a poet. And we are all the better for reading him, because he tells us the things we want to know, or that we only half know, thereby interesting us in things wholesome and help ful. "And that is just what all this jubilation was about, and not because a big, bumptious, egotistic fellow, with a section of the alphabet appended to his name, had climbed onto a treacherous pedestal and bade us look upon him. "Our poet lives in little Lockerbie Street, but he belongs to no single town or city or state. His mis sion being to the people, not alone to the learned and great, but to the common people, his home is with them, not exactly 'boardin' around/ but living with them." Truly, Riley himself has sized up the People's THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 37 Poet in these lines he wrote on "The Poet of the Future" : "O the Poet of the Future ! He will come as man to man, With the honest arm of labor, and the honest face of tan, The honest heart of lowliness, the honest soul of love For human-kind and nature-kind about him and above. His hands will hold no harp, in sooth ; his lifted brow will bear No coronet of laurel nay, nor symbol anywhere, Save that his palms are brothers to the toiler's at the plow, His face to heaven, and the dew of duty on his brow." CHAPTER II THE FAITH OF JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY NOTWITHSTANDING his immense popu larity, very few people ever even think of James Whitcomb Riley as a religious poet. "Oh, yes," they say, "he wrote of home and children and nature but religion : No !" Wordsworth described poetry as "the impassioned expression which is the countenance of all science" ; "the first and last of all knowledge" ; "as immortal as the heart of man." If Wordsworth has not over stated the matter (and he has not), it follows that no one can be the best poet without a high, heroic idea of religion. No poet can properly be described as religious simply because of the recurrence of holy phrases in his poems ; but rather because of the spirit which permeates the whole, as an incandescent bulb shines through an alabaster vase. James Russell Lowell asserts that reverence is the very primal 38 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 39 essence and life of poetry. "From reverence the spirit climbs on to love, and thence beholds all things." Here again Riley is not found wanting. Reverently does he contemplate the universal laws of the soul. I have read with care every line of his Complete Works, and have been deeply im pressed how he, as a true seer, often brings to view fragments of the broken table of God's law, and makes known the meaning thereof to his generation. He rarely or never invokes the mythologies. He shows a strict adherence to the ancient beliefs and pieties. There is in him nothing of the modern skeptical mockery which indulges itself in facetious flippancies, counting nothing too sacred for its acid jests. There are some people in whom the questioning, doubting spirit has grown so strong that they say they can not believe. There are some who think it smart to say that they do not believe; there are others who with hungry eyes and aching heart say that they wish they could believe. Mr. Riley strikes the nail squarely on the head when he says, "We Must Believe," the motif of which is: "Lord, I be lieve ; help Thou mine unbelief." Mr. Riley says that from birth we are endowed with love and trust, and 40 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET that just as instinctively as the child believes in the parent, so we must believe in God. He says we must believe, because we have been impelled from infancy to seek some clear fulfillment withheld from seekers here on earth. We do not find the perfec tion or the glories for which we are seeking. We have seen its promise in the glories of the physical universe and the tear of sodden sorrow: "We must believe Being from birth endowed with love and trust; Born unto loving; and how simply just That love that faith ! even in the blossom-face The babe drops dreamward in its resting-place, Intuitively conscious of the sure Awakening to rapture ever pure And sweet and saintly as the mother's own. Or the awed father's, as his arms are thrown O'er wife and child, to round about them weave And wind and bind them as one harvest-sheaf Of love to cleave to, and forever cleave. . . . Lord, I believe : Help Thou mine unbelief. "We must believe Impelled since infancy to seek some clear Fulfilment, still withheld all seekers here; For never have we seen perfection nor The glory we are ever seeking for : But we have seen all mortal souls as one t Have seen its promise, in the morning sun THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 41 Its blest assurance, in the stars of night; The ever-dawning of the dark to light; The tears down-falling from all eyes that grieve The eyes uplifting from all deeps of grief, Yearning for what at last we shall receive. . . . Lord, I believe: Help Thou mine unbelief. "We must believe : For still all unappeased our hunger goes, From life's first waking, to its last repose: The briefest life of any babe, or man Outwearing even the allotted span, Is each a life unfinished incomplete: For these, then, of th' outworn, or unworn feet Denied one toddling step O there must be Some fair, green, flowery pathway endlessly Winding through lands Elysian ! Lord, receive And lead each as Thine Own Child even the Chief Of us who didst Immortal life achieve. . . . Lord, I believe: Help Thou mine unbelief." No real objection can be raised against making the affirmation of the deep things of religion by faith. Faith is the sixth sense of the soul. It is a worthy organ of confidence in spiritual things. Riley holds in his "Uncle Sidney's Views" that the true age of wisdom is when we are boys and girls and know things because we believe them no matter whether they agree with laws or not : 42 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET "It is faith, then, not science and reason, I say, That is genuine wisdom. And would that to-day We, as then, were as wise and ineffably blest As to live, love and die, and trust God for the rest !" Riley had a good religious foundation. He was descended from a long line of devout Christians. His grandmother on his father's side, Margaret Slick Riley, often preached not licensed, but by privilege. She had two brothers who were Meth odist preachers. His grandfather Marine, on his mother's side of the house, was also a Methodist preacher. We find traces of Riley's affection for his preacher grandfather in several of his early poems, notably in "The Old-Fashioned Bible," printed in 1881, before he had caught the eye of Fame. In it we can see the little boy with corn- silk white hair, and wide blue eyes, gazing with wonder upon the "gravely severe" face of the Meth odist preacher his grandfather! Ah! blessed days when the future poet laureate of the people went to the Methodist meeting-house, to hear his grand father preach. Let him tell it in his own way : "How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood That now but in mem'ry I sadly review ; The old meeting-house at the edge of the wildwood, The rail fence and horses all tethered thereto ; THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 43 The low, sloping roof, and the bell in the steeple, The doves that came fluttering out overhead As it solemnly gathered the God-fearing people To hear the old Bible my grandfather read. The old-fashioned Bible The dust-covered Bible The leathern-bound Bible my grandfather read. "The blessed old volume 1 The face bent above it As now I recall it is gravely severe, Though the reverent eye that droops downward to love it Makes grander the text through the lens of a tear, And, as down his features it trickles and glistens, The cough of the deacon is stilled, and his head Like a haloed patriarch's leans as he listens To hear the old Bible my grandfather read. The old-fashioned Bible The dust-covered Bible The leathern-bound Bible my grandfather read. "Ah ! who shall look backward with scorn and derision And scoff the old Book though it uselessly lies In the dust of the past, while this newer revision Lisps on of a hope and a home in the skies? Shall the voice of the Master be stifled and riven? Shall we hear but a tithe of the words He has said, When so long He has, listening, leaned out of Heaven To hear the old Bible my grandfather read? The old-fashioned Bible The dust-covered Bible The leathern-bound Bible my grandfather read." In answer to an inquiry of mine, Mr. Edmund H. Eitel, of Indianapolis, editor of the poet's com- 44 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET plete works, his nephew and sometime secretary, wrote me as follows : "Mr. Riley once told me that he was a member of the Methodist Church, and I said, 'Are you still a member?' because I had heard that he had joined on probation, but was never actually taken into the church. He replied, 'I am a member of the Meth odist Church.' So the story I heard was not quite correct. As a young man he was blackboard artist in the Sunday School, and a very effective black board artist, too. Many of his first recitations were given in churches, as for instance, one of his early appearances in Indianapolis was in the Roberts Park Methodist Episcopal Church, at which time he re cited The Bear Story/ This was in 1874." It has been said that "the cheery optimism, tol erance and mercy that are the burden of his verse summed up his religion." And yet he had some very definite beliefs. He believed in God. Through a number of years Mr. Riley wrote a long poem of one hundred and five stanzas, which he titled the "Rubaiyat of Doc Sifers." It was written two quatrains on a single white card and these were thrown aside in a hap hazard manner through the years. They were all written in the same verse-form and not having any special contiguity of plan resemble somewhat the THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 45 "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam/' but they are diamet rically opposed to the spirit and faith of Omar's poem. This Doc Sifers is not, strictly speaking, an historical character, but one that Mr. Riley devel oped in his own imaginings until he came to love the character with an ardent love. He himself says that his poem is an indirect reply to the epicurean pes simism and cynicism found in the other Rubaiyat. Doc Sifers is "a picture of a wholesome, helpful, industrious man a doctor with hale faith in God and man, in contrast to the old Persian's utterly hopeless doctrine." In many respects, "Doc Sifers" is Riley himself. Again and again our poet affirms his faith in the overruling Providence of a God who is all-wise, merciful and kind. Take, for ex ample, this stanza from the "Rubaiyat of Doc Sifers": "Doc argies 'at 'The Rey-eyed Law,' as he says, 'ort to learn To lay a mighty leenient paw on deeds o' sich concern As only the Good Bein' knows the wherefore of, and spreads His hands above accused and sows His mercies on their heads.' " He believed in Christ and the gospel He came to proclaim. A friend of mine, the Reverend Doctor W. W. Hall, was holding evangelistic meetings in 46 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET Riley's boyhood home, Greenfield, Indiana, in the fall of 1914, less than two years before the poet's death. Mr. Riley sent him a poem which he had en titled "The Evangelist," with this greeting : "These lines are a greeting to you and an epitome of your first sermon in Greenfield. You are at lib erty with them." And then followed the "lines" as follows : "Hail, Harbinger of God's Good News! 'Good News' to pulpits and to pews: Oh, hear His voice in 'Peace Be still,' And dwell entwined in His sweet will. " 'The Purpose ?' Ah, with glad accord, Put on the armor of the Lord, And forth to battle ! all as one, The fight! The fight! Is now begun! " 'The Plan ?' 'Tis writ with pencil pure, Line and dimension straight and sure: Inquire of Him 'Lord, what to do?' Then let Him have His way in you. "The Motive?' That all tongues confess To Him our Hope and Righteousness 1 Tho' now the view be darkly dim, Through faith we'll win the world to Him ! "'And Victory?' It will be won! God's Promise through His Promised Son! We'll sing it in the realms above Enraptured by Enraptured Love!" THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 47 He believed in the immortal life. Like most of the great realities of religion, he personally sub mitted it to the test of experience. Marcus Dickey in his revelatory Youth of James Whitcomb Riley speaks of the terrific loneliness and sorrow that came into the young man's life through the sudden death of his mother. Mr. Dickey quotes Riley as saying : "I was alone," said he, "till as in a vision I saw my mother smiling back upon me from the blue fields of love when lo ! she was young again. Sud denly I had the assurance that I would meet her somewhere in another world. I was gathering the fruit of what had been so happily impressed on me in childhood. I had seen that the world is a stage. Now I saw that the universe is a stage. Another curtain had been lifted. My mother was enraptured at the sight of new scenery. It was the dream of Heaven with which 'Johnny Appleseed' had im pressed my mother in the Mississinewa cabin." He believes so profoundly in Immortality that he even runs, consciously or unconsciously, into the argument from Evolution, which, let us not forget, teaches us not only the survival of the fittest (and may we not say that a belief that has survived through all the centuries of human existence such as this firm, steadfast belief in the existence of God, 48 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET and a life beyond the grave is evidently a fit belief to survive) ; but it also teaches us that for every natural faculty, appetite, or instinct there is some thing that will answer; and so Mr. Riley insists that our hunger which goes unappeased from life's first waking to its last repose; the feeling that life is somehow unfinished, incomplete; these argue that "O there must be Some fair, green, flowery pathway endlessly Winding through lands Elysian ! Lord, receive And lead each as Thine Own Child even the Chief Of us who didst Immortal life achieve. . . . Lord, I believe: Help Thou mine unbelief." He believed in the forgiveness of sin. After he had made that sad blunder of the Poe Poem hoax, and the world turned its cold shoulder upon him, and in his despair he began to dissipate, then, in re pentance he wrote to an understanding friend, as recorded by Marcus Dickey : "My steps are turning gladly toward the light, and it seems to me sometimes I almost see God's face. I have been sick sick of the soul, for had so fierce a malady attacked the body, I would have died with all hell hugged in my arms. I can speak of this now because I can tell you I am saved." THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 49 Forgiveness does not extinguish the deeds of the past; but it does rearrange the relations between the spirit of man and our Heavenly Father, remov ing the barriers which sin erected between them. Riley's "The Song I Never Sing" tells the story of redeeming love that brings salvation to the sin- dimmed soul. Like a passionate evangelist he pours forth the apostrophe of the last stanza : "O nameless lay, sing clear and strong, Pour down thy melody divine Till purifying floods of song Have washed away the stains of wrong That dim this soul of mine! O woo me near and nearer thee, Till my glad lips may catch the key, And, with a voice unwavering, Join in the song I never sing." He believed in Humanity. He believed in man "As Created" : "There's a space for good to bloom in Every heart of man or woman, And however wild or human, Or however brimmed with gall, Never heart may beat without it; And the darkest heart to doubt it Has something good about it After all." 50 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET In 1907 Mr. Riley published a poem bearing the caption "What Title," which was a tribute to Presi dent Theodore Roosevelt, in which he asks what title best befits our first American. Then he runs over certain names : statesman, soldier, hero, chief, leader, patriot, orator, president, chief executive, but is not satisfied with any of these as the best title by which to describe the one to whom he is paying the tribute. There is something greater than any of these and that word is MAN. There is no cheap thought of man connected with this. He recognizes ^ each individual as sprung of Heaven's first stock; and these are the words with which the beautiful tribute ends : "Nay his the simplest name though set Upon him like a coronet, God names our first American The highest, noblest name The Man." He was a believer in the common man. He be lieved in the laboring man as well as in the great president. In "A Child's Home Long Ago," he says: "'Twas God's intent Each man should be a king a president ; And while through human veins the blood of pride Shall ebb and flow in Labor's ruling tide, THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 51 The brow of toil shall wear the diadem, And justice gleaming there, the central gem, Shall radiate the time when we shall see Each man rewarded as his works shall be. Thank God, for this bright promise ! Lift the voice Till all the waiting multitudes rejoice." It is one of the familiar teachings of scripture that God is no respecter of persons, and Mr. Riley only restated this doctrine in the poem "To Uncle Remus," when he says : "The Lord who made the day and night, He made the Black man and the White; So, in like view, We hold it true That He hain't got no favorite." "The Hired Man's Faith in Children" is Mr. Riley's faith also. It is a faith in humankind that is absolutely necessary in the one who would touch humankind to lift it up. "I believe all childern's good, Ef they're only understood, Even bad ones, 'pears to me, 'S jes* as good as they kin be!" He believed in practical religion. There is a strange kinship between "Doc Sifers" and Christ's illustrations of religion. Christ announced His own program as one of practical service: preaching to 52 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET the poor, healing the broken-hearted, recovering sight to the blind and delivering the captives. When John's disciples came inquiring for His credentials, He simply pointed to the deeds of mercy and serv ice that He had rendered others. So Riley speaks of lovable "Doc Sifers" : "Without a-claimin' any creed, Doc's rail religious views Nobody knows ner got no need o' knowin' whilse he choose To be heerd not of man, ner raise no loud, vainglorious prayers In crowded marts, er public ways, er i jucks, anywheres! " 'Less'n it is away down in his own heart, at night, Facin' the storm, when all the town's a-sleepin' snug and tight Him splashin* hence from scenes o' pride and sloth and gilded show, To some pore sufferer's bedside o' anguish, don't you know 1" Riley strikes no false note. He is a sane and wholesome optimist, guiding our dispositions away from the paths of sin. There are two kinds of sins. One, sins of the body; they are coarse, crude and vulgar; the other the sins of disposition; they are more or less "refined" : selfishness, and jealousy, and egotism, and an unforgiving spirit, and grouchiness, are sins in the sight of God, nevertheless. Mr. Riley has no use for the grouch. The Savior entered into THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 53 the joys of the wedding feast, and laughter, and the music of the prodigal returned, and all the com mon joys of the common life; and He began his tremendous Sermon on the Mount by an eightfold repetition of the word "happy" in intensified form. And Mr. Riley, in his quaint style, gives beautiful expression to this wholesome theology in his lines "On Any Ordenary Man in a High State of Laugh- ture and Delight," when he says : "As it's give' me to perceive, I most cert'in'y believe When a man's jest glad plum through, God's pleased with him, same as you." He believes in the old home. In "Ike Walton's Prayer," which is a lyric of great worth, we have a man who prays not for gold and jewels, and lands and kine, but for a humble home with the light and joy of home; and for a woman who would make of their simple home a place divine, and for just a wee cot and love. He prays not for great riches or vast estates and castle halls, but for the simple things that make life really worth the living: children, sun shine, and the gentle breeze and the fragrance of blossoms, and the songs of birds, and again the wee cot He prays not that man may tremble at his 54 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET power of place and lordly sway, but he prays for the confidence of his neighbor ; and again : "The wee cot, and the cricket's chirr, Love, and the glad sweet face of her." Or again, you can feel a heart-throb, not a mere metrical ictus, in the lines : "We must get home : All is so quiet there : The touch of loving hands on brow and hair Dim rooms, wherein the sunshine is made mild The lost love of the mother and the child Restored in restful lullabies of rain, We must get home we must get home again ! "We must get home again we must we must ! (Our rainy faces pelted in the dust) Creep back from the vain quest through endless strife To find not anywhere in all of life A happier happiness than blest us then. . . . We must get home we must get home again I" He believes in patriotism. His love of the old flag and his devotion to America are sublime. Let us see his self -revelation again in "Doc Sifers" : "Yes-jtr/ Doc's got convictions and old-fashioned kind o' ways And idies 'bout this glorious Land o f Freedom ; and he'll raise His hat clean off, ho matter where, jes' ever' time he sees The Stars and Stripes a-floatin' there and flappin' in the breeze. THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 55 "And tunes like old 'Red-White-and-Blue' '11 fairly drive him wild, Played on the brass band, marchin' through the streets 1 Jes' like a child I've saw that man, his smile jes' set, all kind o' pale and white, Bareheaded, and his eyes all wet, yit dancin' with delight!" Riley has faith in nature. He loves it with an ardent love. He opens our eyes to see the wonder of things as they are. Take, for example, a couple of stanzas out of "The Poems Here at Home" : "What We want, as I sense it, in the line O' poetry is somepin' Yours and Mine Somepin' with live stock in it, and out-doors, And old crick-bottoms, snags, and sycamores: Putt weeds in pizen-vines, and underbresh, As well as johnny-jump-ups, all so fresh And sassy-like ! and groun'-squir'ls, yes, and 'We,' As sayin' is, 'We, Us and Company !' "Putt in old Nature's sermonts, them's the best, And 'casion'ly hang up a hornets' nest 'At boys 'at's run away from school can git At handy-like and let 'em tackle it ! Let us be wrought on, of a truth, to feel Our proneness fer to hurt more than we heal, In ministratin* to our vain delights Fergittin' even insec's has their rights 1" Truly, after reading Riley 's poems through we give our verdict in the words which he wrote on a fly-leaf in John Boyle O'Reilly's Poems : 56 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET "I like the thrill of such poems as these, All spirit and fervor of splendid fact s Pulse, and muscle, and arteries Of living, heroic thought and act ! Where every line is a vein of red And rapturous blood all unconfmed As it leaps from a heart that has joyed and bled With the rights and the wrongs of all mankind." Riley does not have a relatively large number of poems that are on religious subjects, as such; and yet one will often come upon a line or a half-dozen lines of wondrously rich religious value, appar ently dropped incidentally into the middle of some nature or narrative poem which one is perusing, as a man once found a pearl of great price in a field which he was cultivating for another purpose. I have felt that it would be worth while to dig these pearls out and string them together and that is what I have attempted to do in the following chapters. I have found so much of help and inspira tion and joy in these literary-religious pearls that I have collected them for others. I have sought to gather them all up. Therefore, everything that Riley says about God, or Christ, or sin and its for giveness, or immortality, or patriotism will be found in the following chapters. THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 57 If this book shall enhance Riley's popularity with religiously-inclined folk, and religion's popularity with lovers of Riley, I shall be satisfied; for, as he said of John Clark Ridpath, so we say of him : "Thus broadly based, his spacious faith and love Enfolded all below as all above Nay, ev'n if overmuch he loved mankind, He gave his love's vast largess as designed." CHAPTER III "His VOICE MAKES NATIVE CHOICE OF NATURE'S HARMONY" THAT is what James Whitcomb Riley said of Frank L. Stanton. He said that Stanton's song was as "pure as a joyous prayer" because he sang of the fields, the open air, the orchard-bough, the mocking-bird, the blossoms, the wildwood-nook, the dewdrop, "and the kiss of the rose's lip." But when Riley spoke of Stanton he was simply de scribing his own chief theme. Take the first four stanzas of the poem and see how accurately they describe most of Riley's rhymes : "He sings : and his song is heard, Pure as a joyous prayer, Because he sings of the simple things The fields, and the open air, The orchard-bough, and the mocking-bird, And the blossoms everywhere. "He sings of a wealth we hold In common ownership The wildwood nook, and the laugh of the brook, And the dew-drop's drip and drip, The love of the lily's heart of gold And the kiss of the rose's lip. 58 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 59 "The universal heart Leans listening to his lay That glints and gleams with the glimmering dreams Of children at their play A lay as rich with unconscious art As the first song-bird's of May. "Ours every rapturous tone Of every song of glee, Because his voice makes native choice Of Nature's harmony So that his singing seems our own, And ours his ecstasy." What finer description of Riley's nature poetry- could be written than that it is "A lay as rich with unconscious art As the first song-bird's of May." He is truly an artist here of the highest order, albeit his art is unconscious. It has been said that "the function of art is (1) to teach us to see; (2) to teach us what to see ; and (3) to teach us to see more than we see/' Measured by this standard the poems of James Whitcomb Riley reveal the artistic tem perament in all his references to the natural order. 1. HE TEACHES US TO SEE He possessed an extraordinary power of observa tion. There are some men whose eyes are of no more use to other people than if they had painted 60 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET marbles in their heads. The difference between a sharpshooter and the ordinary mass of soldiers is largely a matter of keenness of observation. No one can be a real poet unless he possesses what Thomas Carlyle called "the seeing eye." It is this which reveals the inner harmony of things, and makes known the musical idea which nature has dressed up in these often rough habiliments. To Carlyle's requirement we might add that the poet must possess also the hearing ear, so that when in meekness and love he lays his head upon the mother- breast of nature he will be able to interpret the musical soft beatings of her bounteous heart. Riley possessed both. He was on these intimate terms with nature. In "A Poor Man's Wealth" he revels in his opulence of poverty for "When I ride not with you I walk In Nature's company, and talk With one who will not slight or slur The child forever dear to her And one who answers back, be sure, With smile for smile, though I am poor." In our florid American way we have given many nicknames to this national bard of ours; but one that seems to fit him peculiarly well is "The Bobby THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 61 Burns of America." Burns sang his sweetest songs of the simple, commonplace things that he daily saw and felt, as the lark of his native Scotland goes sing ing its way into the sky, its breast still wet with the dews of earth. Even so is Riley able to see the divine nimbus that hangs over the commonplace things of life. Go through his "Time of Clearer Twitterings" and note the glory with which he sur rounds the shellbark hickory, or sycamore, or hazel thicket, or pennyroyal or mint ! Take the last stanza and read it through and you feel that black-haws and May-apples are as fit subjects for the poet as is "the nectar that Jupiter sips," thus : "Ah ! will any minstrel say, In his sweetest roundelay, What is sweeter, after all, Than black-haws, in early Fall? Fruit so sweet the frost first sat, Dainty-toothed, and nibbled at! And will any poet sing Of a lusher, richer thing Than a ripe May-apple, rolled Like a pulpy lump of gold Under thumb and finger-tips, And poured molten through the lips? Go, ye bards of classic themes, Pipe your songs by classic streams ! I would twang the redbird's wings In the thicket while he sings I" While others would journey to romantic, historic and classic haunts to find some poetic nugget, Riley dug the gold of poetry out of the soil of his native Indiana. Nothing that nature made was considered unworthy of his notice. It is simply astonishing how many of the common things of life he men tions and how frequently he refers to them. I have gone through his Complete Works with con siderable care, and have marked and counted the natural objects that he mentions in his poems. I suppose that I have missed some; but my findings are as follows : He mentions by name thirty-five different flow ers. The rose heads the list, appearing at least ninety-five times. The lily comes second, forty- three times. Then follow the pink, the water-lily, the honeysuckle, the morning-glory, the hollyhock, the primrose, wild-rose, buttercup, tiger-lily, peony, violet, elder-blossom, forget-me-not, sweet-william, sweet-pea, lilac, marigold, daisy, sunflower, aster, phlox, pansy, mignonette, poppy, daffodil, etc. He loves especially the old flowers. He makes the farmer's wife who has grown rich and moved to town express herself in this manner : THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 63 "What's in all this grand life and high situation, And nary pink nor hollyhawk a-bloomin' at the door? Le's go a-visitin' back to Griggsby's Station Back where we ust to be so happy and so porel" Once when he was confined to his bed by sickness, his friend, Eugene V. Debs, brought him a bouquet of roses. Then Riley wrote a dialect poem about "Them Flowers," the closing lines of which are : "You see, it's like this, what his weaknesses is, Them flowers makes him think of the days Of his innocent youth, and that mother o* his, And the roses that she us't to raise; So here, all alone with the roses you send Bein' sick and all trimbly and faint, My eyes is my eyes is my eyes is old friend Is a-leakin' I'm blamed ef they ain't!" Our poet mentions by name forty-three different kinds of trees. The apple tree heads the list, being spoken of thirty-seven times twenty-six times the reference is general five times the Rambo is speci fied, four times the Pippin, once the Prince Harvest and once the White Peruvian. The elm and syca more are each mentioned fourteen times ; the locust, maple and buckeye each thirteen times ; the cherry, peach and oak each eleven times ; the pear and hazel 64 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET each ten times; the beech nine times; we find the plum, quince, haw, cedar, dogwood, mulberry, but ternut, walnut, hickory, poplar, sassafras and so on, at least forty-three different kinds of trees em balmed in his poems. Likewise he sees the grain, the common grain of our fields and he sings of it. Corn appears, by my count, thirty-one times in his poetry; wheat, thirteen times ; barley, three times ; rye, oats, cotton and popcorn each twice ; sorghum, sugar-cane, buck wheat and sweet-corn each once. The wild joy he felt in living close to these grains of the field is ex pressed in that best known of all his lyrics : "When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock," or in his reminiscent "Song of Yesterday" : "And, cool and sweet, My naked feet Found dewy pathways through the wheat ; And out again Where, down the lane, The dust was dimpled with the rain." If Moses saw, in the back part of the desert, a bush aflame with the divine significance, so Riley would teach us to see the Awful Imminence in the THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 65 flaming bloom of clover or goldenrod or ironweed. He speaks of thirty-five different kinds of grass and weeds. Just ordinary unnamed weeds appear seven teen times. Grass is mentioned seventy-eight times ; clover and vines, each twenty-eight ; moss, thirteen ; thistle and reed, each nine times; grape-vine, eight; brier, seven ; pennyroyal and peppermint, four times each; ivy poison vine, calamus, fern, cattail, rush, three times each; dog- fennel, jimson-weed, rag weed, horseradish, dandelion, ironweed and poke- berry, twice each; ginseng, wintergreen, boneset, sheepsour, nettle, mullein, dock-greens, toadstool, pimpernel, each at least once. It was difficult for Riley to write without thinking of the grasses and the blossoms : thus even in "Little Girly-Girl" her blue eyes and glimmering tresses were "Like glad waters running over Shelving shallows, rimmed with clover," and the waving grass becomes billows of beauty and the blossoms but the flecks of foam where the bil lows break : "And the meadow's grassy billows Break in blossoms round the willows Where the currents curve and curl." Riley teaches us to see nearly all of our common 66 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET fruits and vegetables as being not unworthy of poetic treatment. I find the apple (this is specif ically the fruit in addition to the tree referred to above) mentioned at least thirty-five times; sixteen times the variety is not designated; eight times the Pippin is singled out; three times the Prince Har vest ; twice the Rambo ; twice the Russet ; once each the Winesap, the Siberian Crab, the Rhode Island Greening and the Bellflower. Sometimes he makes our mouths water with descriptions of the delicious eating qualities of the apple, and sometimes, as in "A Song of Long Ago," he asks us just to "Let the eyes of fancy turn Where the tumbled Pippins burn Like embers in the orchard's lap of tangled grass and fern." That is exactly what they are like, though we never thought of it until he told us, did we ? The peach (sometimes the "Clingstone," some times the "Freestone" and sometimes just the peach) is mentioned eleven times. The grape comes in seventeen times ; the pear, fifteen times, Bartlett pear once and Sugar pear once; all sorts of fruits and vegetables are glorified by our poet: cherries, plums, berries, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, pumpkin, gourd, lettuce, turnips, rhubarb, THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 67 parsnips, beans, cabbage, beets, watermelons fif teen times: oh, he knows all about "Wortermelon Time" : "Oh ! it's in the sandy soil wortermelons 'does the best, And it's thare they'll lay and waller in the sunshine and the dew Tel they wear all the green streaks clean off of theyr breast; And you bet I ain't a-findin' any fault with them; air you?" And so on to the end : he can tell you the names of the different varieties, and the best ones, and that you must not plant them too near pumpkins, and so on: there is nothing about watermelons which he does not know. And this same wonderful power of observation and meticulous knowledge is seen in all the things of nature of which he writes. He speaks in "Old Heck's Idolatry" of the pear ; but it is more than that, it is a "Tawny, mellow pear, whose golden ore Fell molten on the tongue and oozed away In creamy and delicious nothingness." Or the muskmelon is a "Netted melon, musky as the breath Of breezes blown from the Orient." Or we see the bloom on grape or plum and pass it by unseen until R?ley shows us : 68 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET "And purple clusterings of plum and grape, Blurred with a dust dissolving at the touch Like flakes the fairies had snowed over them." The wild fruits he knows as well as the tame and probably better. They all enter the temple of his poetry for their glorification : hickory nuts, wal nuts, beechnuts, May-apples, wild-strawberries, wild-plums, pawpaws : as a sample of the sheer, un adulterated delight that he found in nature, as well as a sample of wildly imaginative yet; wholly accu rate description, take this delicious stanza out of "Up and Down Old Brandywine" : "And sich pop-paws! Lumps o' raw Gold and green, jes' oozy th'ough With ripe yaller like you've saw Custard-pie with no crust to : And jes' gorges o' wild plums, Till a feller'd suck his thumbs Clean up to his elbows! My! Me some more er lent me die!" The barnyard fowls also are in his poetry, and all kinds of animals, both domestic and wild. I find the chicken mentioned thirty-eight times, the duck and the goose each five times, the turkey and the guinea each four times, and the peafowl once. Among animals, the dog heads the list, appearing at least one hundred and thirty-seven times; and then THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 69 the horse sixty-six times ; the bear sixty times ; the cow forty-two times; the coon twenty-two times; the wolf twenty-one times ; the hog nineteen times ; the sheep thirteen times, and so on: the cat, the panther, the mule, chipmunk, deer, otter, muskrat, weasel, squirrel, fox, possum, rabbit all kinds of animals. And someway or other when we look at these animals through Riley's eyes they no longer seem common or unclean. Take "The Hoss" : "The hoss he is a splendud beast; He is man's friend, as heaven desined, And, search the world from west to east, No honester you'll ever find !" Or take the dog : how much of human nature he expresses, and how faithful portrayal of human affection for a dog he gives us in "When Old Jack Died," the first stanza of which is : "When Old Jack died, we stayed from school (they said, At home we needn't go that day), and none Of us ate any breakfast only one, And that was Papa and his eyes were red When he came round where we were, by the shed Where Jack was lying, half-way in the sun And half-way in the shade. When we begun To cry out loud, Pa turned and dropped his head 70 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET And went away; and Mamma, she went back Into the kitchen. Then, for a long while, All to ourselves, like, we stood there and cried. We thought so many good things of Old Jack, And funny things although we didn't smile > We couldn't only cry when Old Jack died." Our beloved Nature Poet had such wonderful powers of observation that he seemed to hear and see everything. All his faculties were keenly alive. Nature is a page written all over with large and small letters. It is interlined and cross-lined and has many marginal notes. There are many different readers of this interesting page. Some people look at it and see only the headings in large type. Others read much of the story, but never see the inter lining or cross-lining or marginal notes. Most any body will see a horse, but only the few will note that "The hoss-fly is a whettin'-up his forelegs fer biz, And the off-mare is a-switchin' all of her tale they is." Most anybody will see the swan that floats majes tically upon the water, but only the close observer will note what the bumblebees and water-bugs are doing as does Riley in "The Brook-Song" : "Sing about a bumblebee That tumbled from a lily-bell and grumbled mumblingly, Because he wet the film Of his wings, and had to swim, While the water-bugs raced round and laughed at him !" THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 71 Most anybody pities a man in pain, but how many "Pity as much as a man in pain The writhing honey-bee wet with rain," as does Riley in "Away"? Really, his mind was like a photographer's sensitized plate, everything in focus was caught and individualized instantly. We need not be surprised, therefore, to find him mentioning (according to my count) twenty-two different insects. The honey-bee holds the highest place, appearing seventy- four times; the cricket, katydid and firefly each twenty-three times; the bumblebee nineteen times; the dragonfly thirteen times; the locust twelve times; the butterfly nine times, and so on down the list: bug, grasshopper, flea, hornet, glow-worm, fly, horse-fly, mosquito, spider, wasp, yellow- jacket, caterpillar, June bug. His "Two Sonnets to the June-Bug," while excruci atingly funny, is sufficient evidence that he knew the characteristics of these little creatures. In the first sonnet he describes the "eternal buzzin' sere nade" that is kept up by the June bug, and in the sec ond sonnet declares : "And I've got up and lit the lamp, and clum On cheers and trunks and wash-stands and bureaus, And all such dangerous articles as those, And biffed at you with brooms, and never come 72 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET In two feet of you, maybe skeered you some, But what does that amount to when it throws A feller out o' balance, and his nose Gits barked ag'inst the mantel, while you hum Fer joy around the room, and churn your head Ag'inst the ceilin', and draw back and butt The plasterin' loose, and drop behind the bed, Where never human-bein* ever putt Harm's hand on you, or ever truthful said He'd choke your dern infernal wizzen shut!" He is acquainted with fish, too, is Riley, and counts them worthy of a place in his poems. They are found there at least forty times not only fish in general, but in particular there are pike, catfish, bass, sunfish, codfish, sculpin, minnow, sucker, trout, bream and perch. He even calls them by their familiar names, as "Chub," "silver-side," "goggle- eye," and so forth. The turtle, the terrapin, the snail, the fishing worm, the frog, the toad, the tree-toad, the snake with all of these he is well acquainted, and treats them with poetic grace. But it is when he gets among the birds that he throws off all restraint and wallows in bliss. His powers of observation are as keen as those of the birds themselves. In "Knee-Deep in June," he says : THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 73 "Ketch a shadder down below, And look up to find the crow Er a hawk, away up there, 'Pearantly froze in the air ! Hear the old hen squawk, and squat Over ever' chick she's got, Suddent-like ! and she knows where That-air hawk is, well as you ! You jes' bet your life she do! Eyes a-glitterin' like glass, Waitin' till he makes a passl" The birds see quickly everything that is going on around them; so does our poet; but with this dif ference : their vision is sharpened by fear, his vision is sharpened by love. He sees the birds and he knows them by name. How did he ever get to know all of these feathered songsters, to know their plum age and their habits as well as a professional ornith ologist? He did not know that somebody would go through his poems to count how many birds are there, and yet they all come flocking into his rhymes as naturally as they come into our orchards and meadows at the return of summer. I find forty- seven distinct kinds of birds in his poems. The robin is mentioned most frequently, thirty-five times ; the bluebird, twenty-eight ; the dove, twenty- one; the quail (sometimes called "Old Bob White") 74 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET and the whippoorwill are each mentioned eighteen times; the swallow appears twelve times; the red- bird, the lark and the humming-bird each ten times ; the nightingale, hawk and thrush each nine times; the killdeer and the bluejay each eight times; the bat and the red-headed woodpecker (sometimes called "sapsuck") each seven times; and so on through the list, we find the wren, seagull, eagle, blackbird, catbird, buzzard, crane, crow, owl, chick adee (sometimes called the "titmouse" or the "tom tit"), sparrow (or "chipbird"), mocking bird, canary, bee-bird, peewee, bittern, vulture, pelican, kite, kingfisher, loon, snowbird, chewink, snipe, yel- lowbill, flicker (or "yellow hammer"), yellow-bird, martin, raven, bobolink, pigeon. Riley does not only name the birds ; but he knows them. As an example of his meticulous observation of them and of his accurate description of them, take the jay. A scientist (in Webster's New Inter national Dictionary) describes it as follows : "The jays are smaller and more aboreal than the crows, more gracefully formed, more highly colored (blue often predominating), and many species have a long tail and large erectile crest. They have roving habits, harsh voices, pugnacious dispositions, and THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 75 are noted for destroying the nests, eggs and young of weaker birds." Now compare with that scientific description Riley's description. In "Knee-Deep in June," he merely touches the subject, in this manner : "Mr. Bluejay, full o' sass, In them baseball clothes o' his, Sportin' round the orchard jes* Like he owned the premises 1" But he draws the portrait at fuller length in child dialect in "The Jaybird," as follows : "The Jaybird he's my favorite Of all the birds they is ! I think he's quite a stylish sight In that blue suit of his : An' when he 'lights an' shuts his wings, His coat's a "cutaway" I guess it's only when he sings .You'd know he was a jay. "I like to watch him when he's lit In top of any tree, 'Cause all the birds git wite out of it When he 'lights, an' they see How proud he act', an' swell an' spread His chest out more an' more, An' raise the feathers on his head Like it's cut pompadore 1" 76 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET Now, this is the question that obtrudes itself upon us: How could any man see so well all things in nature, and then set down so faithfully what he saw ? How did he happen to notice, as in "A Brave Refrain," on that winter morning that "The knuckled twigs are gloved with frost"? Or how did he happen to notice in that "Vision of Summer" the ". . . lush glooms of the thicket"? Or how did he happen to become so well acquainted with "The Bat," as to tell all about it in two lines : "Thou dread, uncanny thing, With fuzzy breast and leathern wing" ? What was it so sharpened his powers of observa tion as to make him sensitive to colors in nature "From rainbow tints, to pure white snow," as he puts it in "To a Boy Whistling" ? What was it made him so intimate with midsummer as to hail it as "An Old Friend" that brings its harvest store of olden joys, "odorous breaths of clover hay," the doves, and "Vast overhanging meadow-lands of rain, And drowsy dawns, and noons when golden grain Nods in the sun"? THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 77 Why in his appeal to "Babyhood" did he yearn to "Turn to the brook where the honeysuckle tipping O'er its vase of perfume spills it on the breeze, And the bee and humming-bird in ecstasy are sipping From the fairy flagons of the blooming locust trees"? How had he come to observe both the dragonfly and blossoms so carefully as to remark casually in "Pan" the dragonfly was "Like a wind-born blossom blown about ?" Or what was it prompted him to watch a primrose blossoming out so that when he wanted to tell of "Armazindy's" transformation from a child to a woman, he likened her to the primrose : "Jevver watch a primrose 'bout Minute 'fore it blossoms out Kind o' loosen-like, and blow Up its muscles, don't you know, And, all suddent, bu'st and bloom Out life-size?" What is the answer to all these questions ? There is only one answer, and that is Riley's true love of nature. He was not a cold-blooded specialist peep ing into nature's closets. He was a lover who lived close to nature's heart, who looked lovingly and steadily at nature, observing the individual features 78 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET of bird and bee, of field and flower. He joyed in seeing "Nothin* but green woods and clear Skies and unwrit poetry By the acre 1" as he put it in "A Pen-Pictur* of a Cert' in Friwolus Old Man." His ear detected the most furtive sounds. He listened even when he could "Hear nothin* but the silunce." His nose detected the most fugitive odors all be cause he was a lover of nature. Love sharpens the vision and the hearing; enlivens the feet; steadies the hand. It is as important to enjoy as it is to understand. Riley absorbed as well as investigated. His poems have a strong flavor of the rank, rich soil from which they sprang. It is out of this sympathetic and emotional en joyment of nature that the lyric is born. The one capable of it feels that the "Unwrit poetry by the acre" is all his. His joy, wonder, worship, surge to ex pression. He perceives everywhere a harmony which is beauty, and he bodies it forth in material THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 79 form through the medium of words, fashioning it according to his own mood. This pageantry of color and form and sound and stir that he notes ev erywhere in earth and sky and air floods his whole being with emotion and bids him sing in accordant rhythm, and so he sings "A Song" : "There is ever a song somewhere, my dear ; There is ever a something sings alway; There's the song of the lark when the skies are clear, And the song of the thrush when the skies are gray. The sunshine showers across the grain, And the bluebird trills in the orchard tree; And in and out, when the eaves drip rain, The swallows are twittering ceaselessly. "There is ever a song somewhere, my dear, Be the skies above or dark or fair, There is ever a song that our hearts may hear There is ever a song somewhere, my dear There is ever a song somewhere." This is the very spirit of poetry. The note of lark or bluebird or swallow gives the key. The song that is ever somewhere is etherealized into rarer music by the poet's transfiguring and interpreting tempera ment. It is emotion that gives birth to the lyric poem. One April day in 1891, Mr. Riley wrote "The First Bluebird." Though it is in the Hoosier dialect and pretends to be a "Benj. F. Johnson of 80 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET Boone" poem, yet it is just what all lovers of nature have felt (and been unable to express) after a win ter of "rain and snow! and rain again." Thus: "This morning I was 'most afeard To wake up when, I jing! I seen the sun shine out and heerd The first bluebird of Spring! Mother she'd raised the winder some ; And in acrost the orchard come, Soft as a' angel's wing, A breezy, treesy, beesy hum, Too sweet for anything! "The winter's shroud was rent apart The sun bu'st forth in glee, And when that bluebird sung, my hart Hopped out o' bed with me !" Go through "A Hoosier Calendar" which Riley wrote, having a stanza for each month, and see the poet's full outpouring of himself. He does not care so much for the first three months, but in April he begins to get "inspiration," and then May : "And May! It's warmin' jest to see The crick thawed clear ag*in and dancin* ; 'Pears-like it's tickled 'most as me A-prancin' 'crosst it with my pants on t And then to hear the bluebird whet His old song up and lance it through you, Clean through the boy's heart beatin' yet Hallylooya!" THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 81 But it is by no means only in "A Hoosier Cal endar" that we find the full outpouring of our bard's self in lyric poems. He revels in "The Laugh ter of the Rain" : "The rain sounds like a laugh to me A low laugh poured out limpidly." He was profoundly sensitive to the beauty of the world. He loved nature for her own sake, and be cause she ministered to his love of what was fair and good to look upon. With perfect abandon he sings "The Brook-Song" : ""Little brook ! Little brook ! You have such a happy look Such a very merry manner, as you swerve and curve and crook As your ripples, one and one, Reach each other's hands and run Like laughing little children in the sun 1" To my mind, the best example of Riley's nature poetry is "The South Wind and the Sun." He al ways had a particular affection for this poem. It is longer than most of his lyrics, containing twenty stanzas of eight lines each and it should all be read and re-read aloud for one to be borne along on the swelling current of its warm and colored image, and 82 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET to eddy in its surgent, glowing words. Take, for example, two stanzas the first one and another picked at randon from the middle of the poem ; "O the South Wind and the Sun I How each loved the other one ; Full of fancy full of folly- Full of jollity and fun ! How they romped and ran about, Like two boys when school is out, With glowing face, and lisping lip, Low laugh, and lifted shout! "Over meadow-lands they tripped, Where the dandelions dipped In crimson foam of clover-bloom, And dripped and dripped and dripped ; And they clinched the bumble-stings, Gauming honey on their wings, And bundling them in lily-bells, With maudlin murmurings." The month of June always set Riley going. One of his earliest poems he entitled "June," in which he declared that he nestled like a drowsy child and dozed in June's ". . . downy lap of clover-bloom ;" and he heard the lily blow "A bugle-call of fragrance o'er the glade," Better known than Lowell's "What is so rare as a 83 day in June?" is Riley's "Knee-Deep in June." It seems as though everybody knows it or ought to. It closes with words that hold forever, as an aroma, the evanescent mood of the nature-lover: "But when June comes Clear my th'oat With wild honey! Rench my hair In the dew 1 and hold my coat ! Whoop out loud 1 and th'ow my hat I June wants me, and I'm to spare! Spread them shadders anywhere, I'll git down and waller there, And obleeged to you at that!" But our poet uses the lyrical form also as the means of expression for his ripest wisdom and most burdened thought. Sometimes it is a welling song and sometimes a cry; but it is still the lyric. He meets and masters every mood. He transmutes his private griefs as well as his private joys into the great passionate streams of universal suffering with in reach of all men. Read through (and weep while you read) the lines he wrote "On the Death of Lit tle Mahala Ashcraft," the opening stanza of which is: "Tittle Haly! Little Halyl' cheeps the robin in the tree; *Little Haly 1' sighs the clover, 'Little Haly !' moans the bee ; Little Haly! Little Haly!' calls the killdeer at twilight; And the katydids and crickets hollers 'Haly!' all the night." 84 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET Riley is in deep sympathy with all of nature's moods, and he feels that nature is in sympathy with him. Therefore, the robin and the bluebird can sing in sadder notes when he is sad, and though sometimes the rain is like "low laughter," yet when he weeps it is like "wild gusts of tears." Thus when "Little Marjorie," the four-year-old daughter of his friend, William C. Bobbs, died, he wrote an appeal ing poem, the first two stanzas of which are : "'Where is little Marjorie?' There's the robin in the tree, With his gallant call once more From the boughs above the door ! There's the bluebird's note, and there Are spring-voices everywhere Calling, calling ceaselessly 'Where is little Marjorie?' "And her old playmate, the rain, Calling at the window-pane In soft syllables that win Not her answer from within *Where is little Marjorie?' Or is it the rain, ah me! Or wild gusts of tears that were Calling us not calling her !" We get the same feeling of our brooding Poet's mystic sympathy with nature that not only enables him to understand nature's secrets, but also makes THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 85 nature meet his every mood. We are thinking just now of how no mood is denied the lyric. "Our Lit tle Girl" is an illustration of its characteristic note of intense personality. Sorrow, regret, tears, sob all the way through it. The Poet transmutes his private griefs into the great passionate universal yearning : "We want our little girl again" : "And yet the way before us O how empty now and drear ! How e'en the dews of roses Seem as dripping tears for her ! And the song-birds all seem crying, As the winds cry and the rain, All sobbingly, 'We want we want Our little girl again !' " 2. HE TEACHES US WHAT TO SEE The function of art is not only "to teach us to see," but also "to teach us what to see." Measured by this standard, James Whitcomb Riley's nature poetry is not found wanting. He is not only a care ful observer, seeing and hearing everything because he loves nature; but he possesses powers of descrip tion that are nothing short of marvelous. Who that has ever done that most delightful work of plowing a loamy sod-field on a spring day does not thank Riley for his whimsical descriptions in "Mis- 86 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET ter Hop-Toad." We followed the plow across the field ; but we failed to see what we might have seen. Take the first stanza as a sample : "Howdy, Mister Hop-Toad I Glad to see you out ! Bin a month o' Sund'ys sense I seen you hereabout. Kind o' bin a-layin' in, from the frost and snow? Good to see you out ag'in, it's bin so long ago I Plows like slicin' cheese, and sod's loppin' over even ; Loam's like gingerbread, and clods's softer'n deceivin' Mister Hop-Toad, honest-true Spring-time don't you love it? You old rusty rascal you, at the bottom of it!" That is just right: it "plows like slicin' cheese"; the "loam is like gingerbread." Why, of course! We have seen that kind of plowing many a time; but we never had the fun of making that figure of speech. Every farmer should thank Riley for tak ing the drudgery out of farm work ; for calling at tention to the inconspicuous beauties which the prosaic toilsomeness of country life has too often failed to perceive. His "Thoughts fer the Discur- aged Farmer" are good for all of us, no matter what our occupation. If we read it aloud on a summer morning we are bound to go singing to our work, whether that work be in harvest field or mill or mine or store or office or bank. What glowing imagery ! The summer wind smelling the sweet fragrance of THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 87 the locust blossoms; the bees "swigging" honey until they stutter in their buzzing or stagger in their flying; the flicker rolling up its feathers for joyous work as a farmer rolls up his sleeves ! Thank you, Riley, for opening our eyes to see the wonders of a June morning! "The summer winds is sniffin* round the bloomin' locus' trees ; And the clover in the pastur is a big day fer the bees, And they been a-swiggin' honey, above board and on the sly, Tel they stutter in theyr buzzin' and stagger as they fly. The flicker on the fence-rail 'pears to jest spit on his wings And roll up his feathers, by the sassy way he sings ; And the hoss-fly is a-whettin'-up his forelegs fer biz, And the off -mare is a-switchin' all of her tale they is." And so he goes on through four more stanzas open ing before our wondering vision the amazing de lights of a summer morning, ending with the unfor gettable lines : "Fer the world is full of roses, and the roses full of dew, And the dew is full of heavenly love that drips fer me and you." One summer when Riley was only twenty-five years of age, he was visiting friends for a week at an old-fashioned homestead on the banks of Lick Creek. One day he went out and spent a few hours with some thrashers, and then returned across fields 88 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET to the homestead three miles away. At one point he followed what he called "a darling pathway/' over hung with willow boughs. He forthwith wrote twenty-six stanzas to describe the delights of "A Country Pathway." Before going for a walk in the country again, read this graceful poem through, and you will see things you never saw before. For in stance, when you come to a meadow you will see the clover stalks nodding in the breeze; but more than that, you will see them shake rosy fists at you as though they resented the intrusion, and, protesting, they will threaten to drive you out, as though the bumblebees buzzing around the clover were their watch-dogs. He is following the Pathway : "In pranks of hide-and-seek, as on ahead I see it running, while the clover-stalks Shake rosy fists at me, as though they said 'You dog our country walks " 'And mutilate us with your walking-stick ! We will not suffer tamely what you do, And warn you at your peril, for we will sick Our bumblebees on you !' " The farmer who goes out to husk his corn on an autumn morning, "When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock," knows after reading THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 89 Riley (though he may not have known it before) that: ". . . the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock." The Hoosier bard has done us all a rare service in stimulating our eyes to see, and our ears to hear, in all the little commonplaces about us, those endlessly changing details which make life everywhere so un- fathomably, immeasurably wondrous. In his "Life at the Lake" we behold nature as truly a miracle, getting that inspiration which miracles always breathe into the spirit of mankind. We behold : "The green below and the blue above ! The waves caressing the shores they love." We hear "The leaf-hid locust whet his wings," and we are glad to be told what the locust is doing when he makes that peculiar noise; we never knew before; but now it does sound like the farmer whet ting his scythe. Vividness distinguishes the descrip tive passages of all of Riley 's nature poetry. He sets his scenes in vividly real background so faith- 90 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET ful to actual nature that the local sentiment aroused as you read his poems may generally be accepted as true. Take a bit of description out of the center of his long poem, "Old Hec's Idolatry" his "Knights" suddenly came "Upon an open road that circled round A reedy flat and sodden tract of sedge, Moated with stagnant water, crusted thick With slimy moss, wherein were wriggling things Entangled, and blind bubbles bulging up And bursting where from middle way upshot A tree-trunk, with its gnarled and warty hands As tho' upheld to clutch at gliding snakes Or nip the wet wings of the dragon-fly." Mr. Riley's greatest nature descriptions have to do with the summer-time. Even in the winter he can make us see summer. If you doubt this read "The Muskingum Valley," a poem which he com posed while riding up the Muskingum Valley, in Ohio, all day in an old hack on a bitterly cold day in March, to fill a lecture engagement at McConnells- ville. He says : "During the journey the cold was so trying that in reaction and for diversion I busied myself picturing the summer-time in the valley and the beauty of it." He succeeded so well that, read ing it anywhere, anytime of year, we can see the THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 91 blossoms and the soft-sloping hills and the river as restful as "an old fiddle-tune." We quote the first stanza as a sample : "The Muskingum Valley ! How longin' the gaze A feller throws back on its long summer days, When the smiles of its blossoms and my smiles wuz one- And-the-same, from the rise to the set of the sun : Wher' the hills sloped as soft as the dawn down to noon, And the river run by like an old fiddle-tune, And the hours glided past as the bubbles 'ud glide, All so loaferin'-like, 'long the path o' the tide." Some of us never really saw "A Summer Sun rise" until we read*Riley's beautiful poem with that tide. Take a few lines picked at random : "And mountains, peering in the skies, Stand ankle-deep in lakes of gold." What a vivid description suggesting the mountains standing there in the morning sunlight, "ankle-deep in lakes of gold," and "peering in the skies." We have often seen mountains do just that thing, but we did not know that was what they were doing until Riley taught us to see. "And spangled with the shine and shade, I see the rivers raveled out In strands of silver, slowly fade In threads of light along the glade Where truant roses hide and pout." 92 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET That is a true scene in God's open country on a summer morning: the gleaming rivers across the landscape are "raveled out in strands of silver" ; "But as I gaze, the city's walls Are keenly smitten with a gleam Of pallid splendor, that appalls The fancy as the ruin falls In ashen embers of a dream." Riley always excelled in his descriptions of the coming of dusk. In his "August," after faithfully picturing "a day of torpor in the sullen heat of Summer's passion," he represents Day, in the clos ing lines, as going to sleep in the arms of Night: "Till, throbbing on and on, the pulse of heat Increases reaches passes fever's height, And Day sinks into slumber, cool and sweet, Within the arms of Night" We have all gazed in rapture at the first star shin ing in the sky at even time, and sometimes in child ish inquisitiveness wonder how it got there; but in his "Dusk Song" our poet makes us see it as vividly as we have seen boys wading in a river : "One naked star has waded through The purple shallows of the night." For exalted description and the creation of the concomitant of emotional tone, I know nothing that THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 93 surpasses his account of "Dusk" in "Dead Leaves." The first sentence must suffice here : "The frightened herds of clouds across the sky Trample the sunshine down, and chase the day Into the dusky lands of gray And somber twilight." Not unlike the foregoing are some lines found in "Thanksgiving Day at Hunchley's," where he pic tures mystic voices and sounds of terror bred of nature's laws : "I have leaned upon Niagara, and heard the wailing tide Where it leaps its awful chasm in unending suicide : "I have heard the trampling footsteps of the roaring hurricane As he lashed his tail of lightning, and tossed his shaggy mane ; I have heard the cannonading of the devastating storm." Riley possessed to a more marked degree than any other American writer the art of describing natural objects and presenting ideas in symphonies and harmonies of tone. Almost .any one of his nature poems will illustrate this fact. Read aloud, for instance, two or three stanzas from "The Shower," and see how they impress you : "The landscape, like the awed face of a child Grew curiously blurred ; a hush of death Fell on the fields, and in the darkened wild The zephyr held its breath. 94 THE FAITH OF TH PEOPLE'S POET "The sullen day grew darker, and anon Dim flashes of pent anger lit the sky; With rumbling wheels of wrath came rolling on The storm's artillery. "The cloud above put on its blackest frown, And then, as with a vengeful cry of pain, The lightning snatched it, ripped and flung it down In raveled shreds of rain." 3. HE TEACHES US TO SEE MORE THAN WE SEE It is a further function of art to "teach us to sec more than we see." Riley does it. In his hands the natural becomes a translucent veil through which the spiritual pours its light and inspiration into the hearts of men. The last poem from which we have quoted, "The Shower," was one of his earlier poems, written in April, 1879. It put him in the very van of lyric poets; but more than that, the final stanza of it stamps him as a true artist in the sense of the highest "function of art," which we are now considering : "While I, transfigured by some wondrous art, Bowed with the thirsty lilies to the sod, My empty soul brimmed over, and my heart Drenched with the love of God." Read his works carefully and you will be amazed THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 95 at how often he likens natural objects to psycholog ical phenomena, as in "Dawn, Noon and Dew fall" : "Trompin' home acrost the fields : Lightnin'-bugs a-blinkin' In the wheat like sparks o' things feller keeps a-thinkin' ;" or as in "The Speeding of the King's Spite" : "The girl had grown, in the mother's care Like a bud in the shine and shower That drinks of the wine of the balmy air Till it blooms in matchless flower;" or as in "Squire Hawkins's Story".: "Now love's as cunnin' a little thing As a hummin'-bird upon the wing" ; or as in "The Funny Little Fellow," who had "a heart as mellow as an apple over-ripe," and "His smile was like the glitter Of the sun in tropic lands And his talk a sweeter twitter Than the swallow understands ;" or as when he wants to tell of the mental as well as physical effect that the touch of "Dear Hands" has upon him, he declares that the touches of her hands are light as "the fall of velvet snow-flakes," 96 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET or "the down of the peach," or the "flossy fondlings of the thistle-wisp caught in the crinkle" of a brown leaf, or as "the falling of the dusk at night," or as "the dew that falls so softly down no one ever knew the touch thereof save lovers" ; or as in "Limitations of Genius," he makes us see the agitated whiteness of a pale woman's face when she becomes animated, as: "Her pale face lit Like winter snow with sunrise over it"; or as when he wants to refer to that strange psy chological phenomenon, that sudden clustering of a crowd of boys upon the slightest excitement in any community, "Like a clot of bees round an apple-core" ; or as in "The Harper" where he desires to describe the spiritual effect that the skilful playing of a harp has upon him, he likens the strings to slanting rain and the player's fingers to a drift of faded blossoms : "Like a drift of faded blossoms Caught in a slanting rain, His fingers glimpsed down the strings of his harp In a tremulous refrain"; and he knows of no better way to describe the ex quisite music than to call it "rainy sweet" : THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 97 "Patter and tinkle and drip and drip ! Ah! but the chords were rainy sweet! And I closed my eyes and I bit my lip, As he played there in the street." He closed his eyes and bit his lip because it made him think of the little bed in the corner of the gar ret with the rafters and the little window and "The rain above, and a mother's love, And God's companionship 1" or as in "Armazindy" he compares a bad woman to a snake : oh, how his description of her stings and burns and suits : "But she wuz a cunnin', sly, Meek and lowly sort o* lie, 'At men-folks like me and you B'lieves jes' 'cause we ortn't to. Jes' as purty as a snake, And as pisen mercy sake!" or as in "To My Old Friend, William Leachman," where the soul's sorrow is compared to an icy win ter, and a sympathizing friend to the sun that thaws it out and brings summer to the soul : "And the clock, like ice a-crackin', clickt the icy hours in two And my eyes'd never thawed out ef it hadn't been f er you !" 98 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET Truly, Riley was so much of an artist that all nature seemed like an art-gallery to him, full of lovely pictures. He became the People's Poet be cause he kept close to nature as a source of inspira tion furnishing him an infinite variety of images and fancies. He was not given to "preaching," and yet he beheld nature as a great book of parables which he joyed to interpret for us. He beholds "Autumn" as a harvester, swart and hale, faring homeward with slow stride, "Weary both in arm and limb, Yet the wholesome heart of him Sheer at rest and satisfied." In that graceful poem, "A Country Pathway," he speaks of coming, in his wanderings, to a place where the perfect day bursts into bloom, "And crowns a long, declining stretch of space, Where King Corn's armies lie with flags unfurled, And where the valley's dint in Nature's face Dimples a smiling world." We see more there than we ordinarily see, not only in that the valley is a dimple in nature's face, but more in that the stalks of waving corn are the un furled banners of a triumphant King a King tri umphant over Want. This very thought we find THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 99 brought out more plainly in three lines from "A Child's Home Long Ago" : "The soldier corn-stalks on their battle-ground March on to harvest victories, and flaunt Their banners o'er the battlements of want." He teaches us to see more than we see that's the point. Take "Wortermelon Time," for instance. After dilating at length upon watermelons, and con fessing that the way he "hankers after wortermel- ons is a sin," he calls attention to the "more" : "Oh, they's more in wortermelons than the purty-colored meat, And the overflowin' sweetness of the worter squshed betwixt The up'ard and the down'ard motions of a feller's teeth, And it's the taste of ripe old age and juicy childhood mixed." Our Poet is always seeking* for the infinite not so much the infinite in contradistinction to the finite, as the infinite in the finite. He confers spirituality and permanence on the fleeting objects of sense. He makes this world the visible symbol of a spiritual power. He invests the world with light. Thus from a good-natured contentment with the kind of weather that God sorts out and sends him, he rea sons, as in "Wet-Weather Talk," to a comforting belief in the wise over-ruling Providence of God in all the vicissitudes of life; for though 100 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET "These-here cy-clones a-foolin' round And back'ard crops! and wind and rain! And yit the corn that's wallerd down N May elbow up again 1" In the beautiful sonnet which he calls "Sun and Rain," he makes us see the glimmering mist of blended sunshine and rain as God's smile; the lily bows like a white saint in prayer; the blossoms, with divine tenderness, lift their wet eyes to heaven as does the Poet : "All day the sun and rain have been as friends, Each vying with the other which shall be Most generous in dowering earth and sea With their glad wealth, till each, as it descends, Is mingled with the other, where it blends In one warm, glimmering mist that falls on me As once God's smile fell over Galilee. The lily-cup, filled with it, droops and bends Like some white saint beside a sylvan shrine In silent prayer ; the roses at my feet, Baptized with it as with a crimson wine, Gleam radiant in grasses grown so sweet, The blossoms lift, with tenderness divine, Their wet eyes heavenward with these of mine." After Mr. Riley had read Oliver Davie's "Rev eries and Recollections of a Naturalist" (which Robert G. Ingersoll called "one of the finest tributes to Nature ever penned"), he wrote a poem which he calls "The Naturalist." While it purports to be a THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 101 description of Oliver Davie, it in very truth de scribes the service that our Hoosier bard has ren dered us; for he has caused us to go forth to the forest where peace and love breathe prayer-like in the breeze and in the coo of doves ; he has caused us to uncover our heads and hear the Master speak to us in the spirit of the wood ; he has taught us to "see more than we see" in the birds and the grasses and even the rain : "In gentlest worship has he bowed To Nature. Rescued from the crowd And din of town and thoroughfare, He turns him from all worldly care Unto the sacred fastness of The forests, and the peace and love That breathes there prayer-like in the breeze And coo of doves in dreamful trees Their tops in laps of sunshine laid Their lower bows all slaked with shade. "With head uncovered has he stood, Hearing the Spirit of the Wood Hearing aright the Master speak In trill of bird, and warbling creek; In lisp of reeds, or rainy sigh Of grasses as the loon darts by Hearing aright the storm and lull, And all earth's voices wonderful, Even this hail an unknown friend Lifts will he hear and comprehend." 102 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET Mr. Riley was a great admirer of John Clark Rid- path. After his death he wrote a tribute which was read at his memorial service in which he gives us a cross-section of his own heart and mind: "The skies, the stars, the mountains and the sea, He worshiped as their high divinity Nor did his reverent spirit find one thing On earth too lowly for his worshiping. "The weed, the rose, the wildwood or the plain, The teeming harvest, or the blighted grain, All all were fashioned beautiful and good, As the soul saw and the senses understood." That is fine! It all depends upon the soul that sees and the senses that understand. His "reverent spirit" finds nothing "on earth too lowly for his worshiping." Truly, a reverent spirit is a posses sion not to be lightly esteemed. Reverence is one of the cardinal virtues. When a man has the right kind of eyes he will see God in nature as Jesus saw Him in the flight of birds and in the flowers of the field. He will see Him as Wordsworth saw Him in that lovely valley of the Wye, near Tintern Abbey; or, as once when he saw a single primrose growing upon a rock, and, brooding upon it, said : "Thou art THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 103 become to me the court of Deity." It was the great scientist, Louis Agassiz, who said : "Back of the law written in the rocks is the hand that writes ; back of the hand is a mind it is the Mind of the Living God." God is present everywhere. He made the mountains to shoulder up the sky. He clothes the earth with vestments of green. The stars are but sparks struck out on the anvil of His eternal pur pose, and His power keeps them burning now in the illimitable depths of space. I have no sympathy with that false supernaturalism that finds God only in signs and wonders. He is as much in the buds of spring, arid the growing corn, and the ripening har vest to-day as He was in the giving of manna to the wilderness- wandering Israelites of long ago. After all, the best way to cultivate the sense of reverence and awe is not by some mighty and phenomenal contingency, but by the influence of the common place. I f we approach each bush with reverence, we may detect a mystic, burning Presence. Riley teaches us to see that "all works" "worthy of Omnip otence" are worthy of our reverence. This is the whole meaning of his poem, "The Rest," the closing stanza of which contains the following lines : 104 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET "It was enough, thus childishly to sense All works since worthy of Omnipotence As worshipful. Therefor, as any child, He knelt in tenderness of tears, or smiled His gratefulness, as to a playmate glad To share His pleasures with a poorer lad." That is a very beautiful thought: that we should be as simple and sincere in our gratitude to God for the wonderful world He has given us as a poor lad would be to a playmate who had shared his pleas ures with him. No wonder that Riley concluded "The All-Golden" with the rapturous outburst : "My soul soars up the atmosphere And sings aloud where God can hear, And all my being leans intent To mark His smiling wonderment. O gracious dream, and gracious time, And gracious theme, and gracious rhyme When buds of Spring begin to blow In blor.soms that we used to know And lure us back along the ways Of time's all-golden yesterdays !" Thank you, dear Poet of the People, for the things you have taught us. Your "song makes of Earth a realm of light and shadow," "vast and grand with splendor of the morn," and your voice "makes melodious all things below," as you once THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 105 said of your friend, Benj. S. Parker. So do we take your words and make them our own, address ing them back to you with utter sincerity : "Thy rapt song makes of Earth a realm of light And shadow mystical as some dreamland Arched with un fathomed azure vast and grand With splendor of the morn; or dazzling bright With orient noon ; or strewn with stars of night Thick as the daisies blown in grasses fanned By odorous midsummer breezes and Showered over by all bird-songs exquisite. This is thy voice's beatific art To make melodious all things below, Calling through them, from far, diviner space, Thy clearer hail to us. The faltering heart Thou cheerest ; and thy fellow mortal so Fares onward under Heaven with lifted face." CHAPTER IV THE DOCTRINE OF GOD IN RILEY'S RHYMES EVERY man has some God. It would be just as reasonable to talk about vegetation growing independently of the light of the sun as to talk about man's existence independent of a god. His idea about God is fundamental. As the light of the sun gives color to everything; to the modest violet blooming alone in the fence-corner, no less than to the mighty oak that fronts the storm, so man's con ception of God colors every detail of his life, not only his thinking, but also his doing. Deed is only the practical expression of creed. If you know what a man's idea of God is, you can construct the main outlines of his whole belief; for in that idea is bound up what he thinks of right and wrong, of sin and salvation, of time and eternity, of his rela tion to his fellow men and of his relation to the Great Unseen. If we go through James Whitcomb Riley's poetry to discover what he believed concerning God, we shall be as refreshed in spirit as though bland but bracing breezes had blown upon us from the hills of 106 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 107 Heaven; we shall be as comforted as a fearful child is comforted when its mother croons to it and cud dles it in the dark and silent night. We can group practically all he says about God under four head ings: (1) An unquestioning belief in the existence of a personal and imminent God; (2) a firm faith in an overruling Divine Providence; (3) confidence that God hears and answers prayer; (4) the fore going rest upon the conviction that God is good and merciful. We find in Riley no trace of that sneering, cynical attitude toward religious questions which was only too common among many of his compatriots. He exercises what Professor James calls "the will to believe." Plaintively he sings "We Must Believe," each stanza of which poem ends with the fervent words : "Lord, I believe : Help Thou mine unbelief 1" To one who is able to think the question through the first reason for believing in the existence of God is the fact that we are able to understand something of the laws that obtain in the universe. For just as we conclude that a musical score that can be un derstood by a rational mind must have been pro- 108 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET duced by a rational mind, even so we conclude that if a rational mind is able to interpret this great piece of cosmic music which we call the universe, it must be the product of the rational mind which we call God. The modern atheist, in offering a mechanical explanation of the universe, spells nature with a capital "N" and science with a capital "S." His "Nature" is the rival of God, and his "Science" leaves the surface of things, where it belongs, and goes beyond the phenomena, and prates of the infin ities and the eternities and "the iron chain of neces sity." In two stanzas of his long and wholesome poem, "The Rubaiyat of Doc Sifers," Mr. Riley introduces us in his quaint Hoosier style to such characters as these in this fashion : "And onc't when gineral loafin'-place wuz old Shoe-Shop and all The gang'ud git in there and brace their backs ag'inst the wall And settle questions that had went onsettled long enough, Like 'wuz no Heav'n ner no torment' jes* talkin' awful rough! "There was Sloke Haines and old Ike Knight and Coonrod Simmes all three Ag'inst the Bible and the Light, and scoutin' Deity. 'Science,' says Ike, 'it DlMonstrates it takes nobody's word Scriptur* er not, it 'vestigates ef sich things could occurred !' " THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 109 Now, in Mr. Riley we find no trace of that incredul ity and spirit of skeptical mockery which scintillates endless epigrams and facetious flippancies, counting nothing too sacred for its acid jest. But just the same, he is able to wield the sharp sword of sarcasm with wonderful skill when the notion strikes him; and we can not but clap our hands in admiration at the fine answer he causes Doc Sifers to make to the cock-sure dogmatism of the shallow-pated shoe-shop loafers : "Well, Doc he heerd this, he'd drapped in a minute, fer to git A tore-off heel pegged on ag'in, and as he stood on it And stomped and grinned, he says to Ike, 'I s'pose now, purty soon Some lightin'-bug, indignant-like, '11 'vestigate the moon! " 'No, Ike,' says Doc, 'this world hain't saw no brains like yourn and mine With sense enough to grasp a law 'at takes a brain divine. I've bared the thoughts of brains in doubt, and felt their finest pulse, And mortal brains jes' won't turn out omnipotent results.'" This is sound philosophy. The mind is awe- stricken as the facts of science flash upon it. In whatever direction we look we see unmistakable evi dences of wisdom, power, benevolence and design. Since the universe bears the impress of mind, a 110 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET mind is the only adequate cause of the universe. Only a mind great enough to cause all other exist ence can be self-existent. It requires God to "turn out omnipotent results." When Mr. Riley's friend, John Boyle O'Reilly, died, our poet declared : w 'Tis promotion that has come * Thus upon him. Stricken dumb Be your meanings dolorous ! God knows what He does." Let us hold fast to that profound doctrine, so simply expressed : "God knows what He does !" The hid den power carrying on the world is purposeful and intelligent. As the scheduled running of a locomo tive can be accounted for only in the acknowledg ment that an engineer is on board, so to talk sen sibly about the dynamism of the world we must lift it to the plane of volitional causation. In his poem, "Good-by er Howdy-do," Riley expresses it exactly : "Some One's runnin' this concern That's got nothin' else to learn; Ef He's willin', we'll pull through Say good-by er howdy-do !" Anselm once said : "The idea of God in the mind of man is the one unanswerable evidence of the ex- THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 111 istence of God." This is up-to-date reasoning; for in a world of reality every natural appetite, desire or power has its counterpart. There is air for the lungs, light for the eye, food for the stomach, truth for the reason, love to answer those who love. Now, man is constitutionally religious. The universal idea of the existence of God is intuitive; it inheres in the very nature of man. Shall we say that nature, which never deceives man in aught else, plays fast and loose with him in this respect? But if the argument is worth anything it points not only to the existence of a Supreme Being, but to a good God who is worthy of our trust, love and worship. In a tender poem, fittingly called "The Enduring," Riley describes the old shoe-shop at Greenfield, In diana, which he frequented when a boy. He con cludes each one of the three verses with the legend that was cut in antique lines over the portal of the shoe-shop : "Wouldst have a friend? Wouldst know what friend is best? Have God thy friend : He passeth all the rest" Our gentle poet tells us that as he reads the words over again, his old eyes make the meaning clearer than did the eyes of youth. Man's religious nature 112 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET is the crown of his being, and can be satisfied with nothing less than God as its counterpart. As the eye was made for light and the ear for sound, so man was made for God. The sentiment with which the poem "Unless" closes is true : "O souls that thirst, and hearts that fast, And natures faint with famishing, God lift and lead and safely bring You to your own at last!" God lifts and leads and satisfies! This spiritual ex perience is the most practical evidence of God. Ex perience is the final test. I have made the test. I have had the spiritual experience which convinces me of the existence of God. I do not stand alone; I am in company with the truest, sanest and best among the sons of men; and I am in line \vith the best philosophy of the time. Pragmatism, of which we hear so much, only means : Does it work ? Is it worth while? Of what value is it? And history has proved that to surrender to the great and good God, to come into communion and fellowship with Him, makes for the holiest character, and inspires the noblest life. By this method, cowards have be come courageous; libertines have become chaste; drunkards have become sober; liars have become truthful; doubters have become disciples; selfish lives have become generous and Christ-like. Have you doubts about the existence of God? Then go to Him through Jesus Christ, by faith link your life with His, and you will be able to say with Riley, who, after a most exquisite description of "The Shower," in lines that might have occurred in the rhapsodies of Isaiah, says : "While I, transfigured by some wondrous art, Bowed with the thirsty lilies to the sod, My empty soul brimmed over, and my heart Drenched with the love of God." That "God is not disquieted" is a great truth that gives sanity to the universe and peace to the mind. It is the motif of "The Legend Glorified" : "Though awful tempests thunder overhead, I deem that God is not disquieted, The faith that trembles somewhat yet is sure Through storm and darkness of a way secure. "Bleak winters, when the naked spirit hears The break of hearts, through stinging sleet of tears, I deem that God is not disquieted ; Against all stresses am I clothed and fed. "Nay, even with fixed eyes and broken breath, My feet dip down into the tides of death, Nor any friend be left, nor prayer be said, I deem that God is not disquieted." 114 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET Is that not a good commentary on the Scripture: "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." Upon the changelessness of God rests our entire confidence in Him, and our reliance upon His proffered mercies and His gracious plans. He "is not disquieted." He is not a God of caprice. He can manage His own work. Heaven is not thrown into a panic because of some temporary turmoil on earth. God is present with us in nature. That is a doc trine of Scripture. The Book of Psalms is a veri table handbook of poetic description. To Jesus, all nature, birds and flowers and fields, spoke of the love and care of God; So, also, does our dear Riley teach us, in his poem to Oliver Davie, "The Nat uralist," that if we have hearing properly attuned we shall "hear aright the Master speak" in all the sweet sounds of nature : / "In gentlest worship has he bowed To Nature. Rescued from the crowd And din of town and thoroughfare, He turns him from all worldly care Unto the sacred fastness of The forests, and the peace and love THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 115 That breathes there prayer-like in the breeze And coo of doves in dreamful trees Their tops in laps of sunshine laid, Their lower boughs all slaked with shade. "With head uncovered has he stood, Hearing the Spirit of the Wood Hearing aright the Master speak In trill of bird, and warbling creek; In lisp of reeds, or rainy sigh Of grasses as the loon darts by Hearing aright the storm and lull, And all earth's voices wonderful, Even this hail an unknown friend Lifts will he hear and comprehend." But not only is God with us in nature: He is with us in history. One can not read Riley's "America's Thanksgiving (1900)" without being hushed with a reverential awe. If the ancient He brews built their temple with a consciousness of the divine overshadowing all their work and lending it unspeakable solemnity, no less truly is one who reads this "Thanksgiving" poem conscious of the overshadowing presence of the great God in all our nation's life; so that with clearer sight we see our boundless debt to God who causes wrong to grow into right, and who transforms the clanging fray of battle discord "into a pastoral song of peace and rest." 116 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET "So, let us thank Thee, with all self aside, Nor any lingering taint of mortal pride; As here to Thee we dare Uplift our faltering prayer, Lend it some fervor of the glorified." In 1620 a Dutch trading ship sailed up the James River, with its cargo of human slaves. The ini quitous business grew on these shores until it be came a hideous nightmare to all right-thinking peo ple. Yet its defenders drove their arguments home with logic and clinched them with Scripture. Some of its horrors were "Told by the Noted Traveler" in Mr. Riley's "Child- World." After this tale had been told, one of those who had listened to it with flushed face, yearned to know "That all unwritten sequence that the Lord Of Righteousness must write with flame and sword, Some awful session of His patient thought. Just then it was, his good old mother caught His blazing eye so that its fire became But as an ember though it burned the same. It seemed to her, she said, that she had heard It was the Heavenly Parent never erred, And not the earthly one that had such grace ; 'Therefore, my son,' she said, with lifted face And eyes, 'let no one dare anticipate The Lord's intent. While He waits, we will wait* " THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 117 And the business grew until it was overthrown by the shock of the sword. Yet through it all God wrought a larger human freedom, and placed upon the white man's heart a new sense of responsibility for the salvation of the dark continent. It is always so. The human will blocks God's plans sometimes. But He can afford to wait. He will triumph in the end. He is always keeping watch over His own. He sways the future. True statesmanship through the ages has been nothing more or less than the abil ity on the part of some men to discern the direction in which God is going, and to move things out of the way for Him. Riley ever sees his entire dependence on Omnipo tence for every gift, and feels that God does all things transcendently well. This is the secret of his good-natured contentment with whatever Provi dence does. I like his "Philosophy" in which he ad ministers this gentle rebuke to the superficial egotist : "The signs is bad when folks commence A-findin' fault with Providence, And balkin' 'cause the earth don't shake At ev'ry prancin' step they take." The same doctrine of the unerring overruling Providence of a good God who will bring victory 118 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET out of defeat and success out of failure, is unmis takably set forth in the dialect poem "Wet- Weather Talk," which is so good and expresses this splendid philosophy of Riley's in such a striking way that I shall give it all: "It hain't no use to grumble and complane; It's jest as cheap and easy to rejoice. When God sorts out the weather and sends rain, W'y> rain's my choice. "Men ginerly, to all intents Although, they're apt to grumble some Puts most theyr trust in Providence, And takes things as they come That is, the commonality Of men that's lived as long as me Has watched the world enough to learn They're not the boss of this concern. "With some, of course, it's different I've saw young men that knowed it all, And didn't like the way things went On this terrestchul ball; But all the same, the rain, some way Rained jest as hard on picnic day; Er, when they railly wanted it It mayby wouldn't rain a bit 1 "In this existence, dry and wet Will overtake the best of men Some little skift o' clouds'll shet The sun off now and then. THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 119 And mayby, whilse you're wondern who You've fool-like lent your umbrell' to, And want it out'll pop the sun, And you'll be glad you hain't got none I "It aggervates the farmers, too They's too much wet, er too much sun, Er work, er waitin' round to do Before the plowin' 's done ; And mayby, like as not, the wheat, Jest as it's lookin' hard to beat, Will ketch the storm and jest about The time the corn's a-jintin' out. "These-here cy-clones a-foolin' round And back'ard crops ! and wind and rain ! And yit the corn that's wallerd down May elbow up again ! They ain't no sense, as I can see, Fer mortuls, sich as us, to be A-faultin' Natchur's wise intents, And lockin' horns with Providence I "It hain't no use to grumble and complain ; It's jest as cheap and easy to rejoice. When God sorts out the weather and sends rain, W'y, rain's my choice." This is not fatalism. It is the bed-rock of the most comfortable philosophy of life. Let the "rain" stand for all the pain, the annoyances, the disap pointments, the frustrated plans of life, the things 120 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET that perplex us and that vex us, and then remember that just when the "rain" threatens, "And maybe, whilse you're wundern who You've fool-like lent your umbrell' to, And want it out'll pop the sun, And you'll be glad you hain't got none !" And the calamity that impended does not happen or if it does, and turns you aside from the path you have worked out for yourself, then when you have climbed the hill of the future and look back over the path you have trod you can see unmistakable signs of the guiding hand of God all the way past. True, God is incomprehensible in His Providence; but Providence is inferred from Redemption, and that in turn shifts back to Creation. For God cre ated the universe because of His desire to communi cate His life ; and to it, therefore, He holds the same relation that a parent does to a child. It might help us to start with the parental instinct, with its pa tience, its unselfishness, its self-denying love, and reason from that up to God. It would be well for us, also, to recall the Providences in our own lives, to have an autobiography in our minds of the influ ences that have entered into the shaping of our lives and the molding of our careers. Thus will it be THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 121 easy for us to make "rain our choice" when God sorts it out for us. For we know that "God is mightier than the storm," as Riley says in "Heat- Lightning" : "If the darkened heavens lower, Wrap thy cloak around thy form ; Though the tempest rise in power, God is mightier than the storm I" One of the greatest hymns of the Church in which Christians have expressed their faith for many years begins : "God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform." It is a stately and majestic hymn, but no truer to Scripture and not as understandable to the common people as is "A Hymb of Faith" written by Jar.ies Whitcomb Riley. It was one of his early poems to appear with the pseudonym "Benj. F. Johnson of Boone," being preceded only by "The Old Swim- min'-Hole" and "Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer." Mr. Riley began to write these "Benj. F. Johnson" poems while he was employed on the Indianapolis Journal in the summer of 1882. At first he was not known as the author of them. He represented them as having been written by a "coun- 122 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET try poet," by this method creating for them the at mosphere of perfect reality. Usually he composed a letter, also purporting to be from "Benj. F. John son of Boone County," to accompany the publica tion of the poem. Thus, with "A Hymb of Faith" was supposed to come this letter : "It will be an undoubtable surprise to you to git the poem I now send to you herein enclosed; but I was a-readin' one which starts out 'God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to pur form,' and the idy struck me that I could write off somepin in that style which would express a man's views," etc. Then follows the "Hymb of Faith," which is more of a prayer than a hymn : "O, Thou that doth all things devise And fashion f er the best, He'p us who sees with mortul eyes To overlook the rest. "They's times, of course, we grope in doubt, And in afflictions sore ; So knock the louder, Lord, without, And we'll unlock the door. "Make us to feel, when times looks bad, And tears in pity melts, Thou wast the only he'p we had When they was nothin' else." Then follow a half-dozen stanzas describing the buf- THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 123 fetings, and yet the triumph, of the life of Jesus, after which comes this expression of faith: "No matter, then, how all is mixed In our near-sighted eyes, All things is fer the best, and fixed Out straight in Paradise. "Then take things as God sends 'em here, And, ef we live er die, Be more and more contenteder, Without a-astin' why." Are you lonesome, so lonesome, and does your back ache, and your head ache, and your heart ache ? God is with you you are not alone. In the person of Jesus Christ, He said: "Lo, I am with you al ways, even unto the end of the world." Is the road that you are traveling rough and steep? But if you look you may see the Master's footprints in the road. And full often God uses our aches and sor rows and burdens to make us conscious of His pres ence, according to Riley's touching poem, "There Is a Need" : "There is a need for every ache or pain That falls unto our lot. No heart may bleed That resignation may not heal again And teach us there's a need. 124 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET "There is a need for every tear that drips Adown the face of sorrow. None may heed, But weeping washes whiter on the lips Our prayers and there's a need. "There is need for weariness and dearth Of all that brings delight. At topmost speed Of pleasure sobs may break amid our mirth Unheard and there's a need. "There is need for all the growing load Of agony we bear as years succeed ; For lo, the Master's footprints in the road Before us There's a need." Is this anything more than a poetic way of ex pressing the great words of Saint Paul : "We know that to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to His purpose." All things : the dark and the light, the sad and the joyous. "The Best is Good Enough" is the title of one of our poet's most thoughtful pro ductions, the climax of which is : "One only knows our needs, and He Does all of the distributing. I quarrel not with Destiny: The best is good enough for me." God is the Divine Physician. He "knows our needs." We shall trust Him to do "all the dis tributing." He knows what distribution to make of the "all things" to make them work together for THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 125 our good, as a physician knows how to compound certain drugs, any one of which alone might be in jurious to us, but which work together for our heal ing. The same comforting thought is repeated in the poem entitled "We to Sigh Instead of Sing," set ting forth the thoughtful goodness of God. He in troduces this thought by describing a day of "rain, rain, nothing but rain," which was followed by a day of shining splendor, and then passes on to show that the tender God will cause the day of weeping to be followed by a day of rejoicing. He says : "We to sigh instead of sing, Yesterday, in sorrow, While the Lord was fashioning This for our To-morrow 1" In "The Sermon of the Rose" our bard again ex presses his faith in the intense and personal care of God. This mellifluous, highly symbolical poem opens with these words : "Wilful we are, in our infirmity Of childish questioning and discontent Whate'er befalls us is divinely meant Thou Truth the clearer for thy mystery! Make us to meet what is or is to be With fervid welcome, knowing it is sent To serve us in some way full excellent, 126 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET Though we discern it all belatedly. The rose buds, and the rose blooms, and the rose Bows in the dews, and in its fulness, lo, Is in the lover's hand, then on the breast Of her he loves, and there dies. And who knows What fate of all a rose may undergo Is fairest, dearest, sweetest, loveliest?" Thank you, dear Riley; I do believe that "what- e'er befalls us is divinely meant" provided, of course, that we "love God." Mr. Riley once wrote a letter to a friend in adversity in which he said : "No mortal condition is better than the one He seems to weigh you down with. In my own case I am coming every day to see clearer the gracious uses of adversity. Simply, it is not adversity. It is the very tenderest most loving and most helpful touch of the hand Divine." In harmony with the doctrine of this letter, we have his poem "Kissing the Rod," which probably is as complete a summary of his message to mankind as is to be found in any one of his poems : "O heart of mine, we shouldn't Worry so! What weVe missed of calm we couldn't Have, you know ! What we've met of stormy pain, And of sorrow's driving rain, We can better meet again, If it blow ! THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET "We have erred in that dark hour We have known, When our tears fell with the shower, All alone ! Were not shine and shower blent As the Gracious Master meant? Let us temper our content With His own. "For, we know, not every morrow- Can be sad ; So, forgetting all the sorrow We have had, Let us fold away our fears, And put by our foolish tears, And through all the coming years Just be glad." In "At Sea," he represents us as being out on a sea, "with lifted sails of prayer," in quest of light, and not finding it. Then he beseeches that the One who wrought earth and sea will "Blow back upon our foolish quest With all the driving rain Of blinding tears and wild unrest, And waft us home again 1" "Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer" was the second poem that Mr. Riley wrote under the pen- name of "Benj. F. Johnson of Boone County." In it, the hale, sound, artless, lovable character is at his 128 THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET best. It is brimful of the most delightful pictorial language. It expresses immaterial ideas by words which suggest pictures from the farm. It is a piece of the wild, capricious music of nature. It is an outburst of lyrical feeling. It is not to our purpose to give it all here; but rather do I pick out a few lines that reaffirm the providential care of God: "Some says the crops is ruined, and the corn's drownded out, And propha-sy the wheat will be a failure, without doubt; But the kind Providence that has never failed us yet, Will be on hands onc't more at the 'leventh hour, I bet !" Then after giving further and worthy reasons for rejoicing, the poem ends with those oft-quoted glor ious lines : "Whatever be our station, with Providence fer guide, Sich fine circumstances ort to make us satisfied; Fer the world is full of roses, and the roses full of dew, And the dew is full of heavenly love that drips fer me and you." How different that from the philosophical doc trine called Pessimism that the world, if not the worst possible, is worse than none at all. In an other of his poems entitled "Our Queer Old World," Mr. Riley has four stanzas in which he describes in dialect style the certain funny, and tragical, and al ways to-be-complained-at existence of the child, and THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE'S POET 129 of the lad, and of the young chap, and of the old man. And in the last stanza after describing the follies and shows and lies and bad weather, and in firmities of age, he says : "We're not a-faultin' the Lord's own plan > All things 's jest At their best. It's a purty good world, old man 1" Another of the "Benj. F. Johnson of Boone" poems that sets forth his homely philosophy of con tentment with things the way the Lord does them is "Us Farmers in the Country." After enumerating the phases of the weather at which "we're apt to