ace's ripples that "gnaw" the shore. Note the
mastery of such lines as

"And the dust of the road is like velvet."

"Nothin' but green woods and clear
Skies and unwrit poetry
By the acre!"

"Then God smiled and it was morning!"

Life is "A poor pale yesterday of Death."

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

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

"At utter loaf."

"Knee-deep in June."

--But I can not go on quoting forever.

Technically, Mr. Riley is a master of surpassing finish. His meters are
perfect and varied. They flow as smoothly as his own Indiana streams.
His rimes are almost never imperfect. To prove his own understanding he
has written one _scherzo_ in technic that is a delightful example of bad
rime, bad meter, and the other earmarks of the poor poet. It is "Ezra
House," and begins:

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

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

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

"----U-
Xorius amnis."

Mr. Riley's animadversions on "Addeliney Bowersox" constitute a
fascinating study in this effect. He is also devoted to dividing an
adjective from its noun by a line-end. This is a trick of Poe's, whose
influence Mr. Riley has greatly profited by. In his dialect poetry Mr.
Riley gets just the effect of the jerky drawl of the Hoosier by using
the end of a line as a knife, thus:

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

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

But it is not his technic that makes him ambrosial, not the loving care
_ad unguem_ that smooths the uncouthest dialect into lilting tunefulness
without depriving it of its colloquial verisimilitude--it is none of
these things of mechanical inspiration, but the spirit of the man, his
democracy, his tenderness, the healt