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THE FIRST WOMAN OF HER DAY 253

our national immortals, a great commonwealth to-day for ever commemorates the services of this American woman to all humanity. And the representatives of the American people, in Congress formally assembled to-day, are paying tribute to the little frontier American maid who heard and heeded the voices that came to her from the unseen world, and, obeying their counsels, became the first woman of her generation, the most beloved character of her time, and, under God, a benefactress of her race.

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY - POET OF THE

PEOPLE

Address as President of a meeting of the Indiana State Teachers' Association in honor of James Whitcomb Riley, in Tomlinson Hall, Indianapolis, December 28, 1905.

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would seem that Indiana and the Middle West, the center of the Republic geographically, the center of the Republic numerically, is becoming the center of the Republic intellectually. Only in America could the center of culture follow close on the heels of the moving center of population; because only in America is learning equally distributed among the people, so that where the center of population is, the center of intelligence must be.

At any rate Indiana at this hour is giving more creative literature to the English-speaking world than any single portion of the Republic. Charles Major, the American Dumas; Meredith Nicholson, our latter-day Hawthorne; George Ade and Nesbit and McCutcheon, whose true humor sets the land aglee; Booth Tarkington, whose genius expresses itself in the most finished art of any contemporaneous novelist; David Graham Phillips, whose savage force and masterfulness are elemental and epochal all these and more are children of Indiana.

And dean of all, first of all and dearest of all is that American Burns, whom Indiana has given to the Nation James Whitcomb Riley. I say given by Indiana to the Nation; for all that Indiana has and is belongs to the Republic as a whole. And, besides, our joy and pride in

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255

this master singer of the people is too great to be provincial. Only the heart of the Nation is great enough to share and hold it.

Dearer to the universal man than its soldiers, statesmen or scholars are the world's poets; for the poet interprets the soul of man to itself and makes immortal the wisdom of the common mind. After all, the source of all poetry is in the hearts of the people. In the consciousness of the masses is that intelligence concerning the higher truths of the universe, of which this life is but a reflection; and it is this intelligence, uttered in words of music, that constitutes real poetry.

So he who knows not the people nor loves them can not sing that song to which their very natures are attuned. The aristocrat of letters may make verses whose perfect art, like that of Horace, renders them immortal, or state high truths in austere beauty, like that of Arnold. But only the brother of the common man can tell what the common heart longs for and feels, and only he lives in the understanding and affection of the millions. Only the man who is close to the earth and, therefore, close to the skies, knows the mysteries and beauties of both. Only he who is close to humanity is close to humanity's God.

This double kinship to God and man of the true poet is what makes him so dear to the man in the furrow and the street he listens and hears a voice of beauty singing the very thoughts his locked lips have not uttered and the yearnings that have filled him always. The poet is our soul's interpreter, voice of our spirit, evangel of our higher and our real life, utterer of the prophecy which God has planted in our breasts.

The poet of the people is a part of the people, and their

better part; and that is why the people love him. That is why we love James Whitcomb Riley. He has understood us understood us because he is of us; and, understanding us, has told us of ourselves, of our ideal selves, and therefore of our truly real selves. For only that is real in the soul of man which to the mind of man is ideal.

That is why the poet of the people becomes the poet universal. He supplies that touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. Everybody knows Burns. His verse has gone into our common speech. We quote him without knowing it. Burns is human and says things we understand and things we need. Omar Khayyam's song of poise and resignation rises above the clattering footfalls of the centuries, and the modern world is listening to him now.

Riley is of this universal quality. He voices the sentiment and wisdom of the common man, and states these in terms of our own dear land. There is something in him of Burns and something of the Tentmaker and a dash of Villon, and yet all Riley, all original, all born of our own home soil. - every atom pure American. What I like most in Riley is his sympathy with everybody and everything that needs or deserves it. The best things in Burns are his songs to a homeless mouse and a mountain daisy crushed beneath his plow. Riley is full of that same charity. He sympathizes with an old horse turned out to pasture.

Sympathy is the divinest faculty of man. It is a suggestion of Heaven. It sweetens misfortune and makes adversity smile. Toil turns to play beneath sympathy's touch, and the thorns of difficulty bear roses. There is nothing so fine as a friendliness of soul that knows and

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understands the sorrows, troubles, temptations, joys, hopes, aspirations and all the emotions of other souls.

Love, like this, is the greatest of gifts. Such friendliness is understood by the common people and in quiet hours. These are qualities growing out of the soil, and so out of the heart of God.

Take all your fine statements of high truths, but leave me the living speech of human sympathy. That is Riley's kind of speech. He is so full of it that it masters him and makes him write it out in poetry. That is how we have Griggsby's Station and Nothin' to Say and The Old Band and Lockerbie Street, and that very tenderest of all his lines expressing a new idea in literature — the sorrow of a childless one, who at heart and in longing and in loving capacity is a parent, for the real parent over the loss of a real child:

Let me come in where you sit weeping,-aye,

Let me, who have not any child to die,

Weep with you for the little one whose love
I have known nothing of.

We have these and a hundred others like them, and thank God for them, and so thank God for Jim Riley.

Riley is more the poet of the people than Burns was in this he is the poet of the children. The plain people love children more than all things else. Only God and country are dearer to the common heart than the infant race growing up to take our place when, like old trees, we shall fall at last. Children are visible immortality. The beauty of youth is the loveliest thing in human life; and in the heart of childhood abides the future.

The common people know children and understand. them; and so does Riley. Shelley's genius arranged

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