d to sing.

The most perfect poetic craftsman of the period--and, many think, our
one faultless worker in verse--was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His first
volume of juvenile verse had appeared in 1855, the year of Whittier's
"Barefoot Boy" and Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." By 1865 his poems were
printed in the then well-known Blue and Gold edition, by Ticknor
and Fields. In 1881 he succeeded Howells in the editorship of the
"Atlantic." Aldrich had a versatile talent that turned easily to adroit
prose tales, but his heart was in the filing of his verses. Nothing so
daintily perfect as his lighter pieces has been produced on this side of
the Atlantic, and the deeper notes and occasional darker questionings of
his later verse are embodied in lines of impeccable workmanship. Aloof
from the social and political conflicts of his day, he gave himself to
the fastidious creation of beautiful lines, believing that the beautiful
line is the surest road to Arcady, and that Herrick, whom he idolized,
had shown the way.

To some readers of these pages it may seem like profanation to pass over
poets like Sill, George Woodberry, Edith Thomas, Richard Hovey, William
Vaughn Moody, Madison Cawein--to mention but half a dozen distinguished
names out of a larger company--and to suggest that James Whitcomb Riley,
more completely than any American poet since Longfellow, succeeded in
expressing the actual poetic feelings of the men and women who composed
his immense audience. Riley, like Aldrich, went to school to Herrick,
Keats, Tennyson, and Longfellow, but when he began writing newspaper
verse in his native Indiana he was guided by two impulses which gave
individuality to his work. "I was always trying to write of the kind of
people I knew, and especially to write verse that I could read just as
if it were spoken for the first time." The first impulse kept him close
to the wholesome Hoosier soil. The second is an anticipation of Robert
Frost's theory of speech tones as the basis of verse, as well as a
revival of the bardic practice of reciting one's own poems. For Riley
had much of the actor and platform-artist in him, and comprehended that
poetry might be made again a spoken art, directed to the ear rather than
to the eye. His vogue, which at his death in 1915 far surpassed that
of any living American poet, is inexplicable to those persons only who
forget the sentimental traditions of our American literature and its
frank appeal to the emotions