"Her face--her brow--her hair unfurled!-- And O the oval chin below, Carved, like a cunning cameo, With one exquisite dimple, swirled With swimming shine and shade, and whirled The daintiest vortex poets know-- The sweetest whirlpool ever twirled By Cupid's finger-tip--and so, The deadliest maelstrom in the world!" It is a strange individuality that Mr. Riley has, suggesting numerous other masters--whose influence he acknowledges in special odes--and yet all digested and assimilated into a marked individuality of his own. He has studied the English poets profoundly and improved himself upon them, till one is chiefly impressed, in his non-dialectic verse, with his refinement, subtlety, and ease. He has a large vocabulary, and his felicity is at times startling. Thus he speaks of water "chuckling," which is as good as Horace'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."