The little arms that slowly, slowly loosed Their pressure round your neck; the hands you used To kiss.--Such arms--such hands I never knew. May I not weep with you? Fain would I be of service--say some thing, Between the tears, that would be comforting,-- But ah! so sadder than yourselves am I, Who have no child to die. Despite his enormous vogue, Riley must be dismissed as artificial and, on the whole, insincere. He seems always to be striving for effect--he is an entertainer who knows his audience and who is never for a moment dull. He has little of insight, little knowledge of the deeps of life and the human soul, little of message, and he wrote enormously too much. He must be rated finally as a comedian, a sentimentalist, an entertainer. His influence has been great. A whole school of imitators has sprung up about him, the most of whom have perished with the papers to which they have contributed. The strongest of them all undoubtedly was Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911) whose _Back Country Poems_ were genuine and distinctive. Drummond's _Habitant_ ballads, which rank with the strongest dialect poetry of the century, belong to Canadian rather than American literature. Stedman's praise of them is none too high: "Most of us are content if we sing an old thing in a new way, or a new thing in an old way. Dr. Drummond has achieved the truest of lyrical successes; that of singing new songs, and in a new way. His poems are idyls as true as those of Theocritus or Burns or our own poet of _The Biglow Papers_."[142] III Greatly different from Riley, yet greatly like him in many ways, was Eugene Field, in whom the lawlessness of the West and the culture of the East met in strange confusion. Though of Western origin--he was born at St. Louis in 1850--he spent the formative years of his life between six and nineteen with his father's relatives at Amherst, Massachusetts. He completed a year at Williams College, then, called West by the death of his father, whose law practice at St. Louis had been distinctive, he was put by his guardian into Knox College. After a year he was transferred to the University of Missouri, but coming of age at the close of his junior year, and his share of his father's estate becoming available, he decided in the spring of 1872 to leave college and travel in Europe. Accordingly, to quote his own words, he spent "six months and [his] patrimony in France, Italy, Ireland, and England." As a general rule one should quote the autobiographical statements of Eugene Field with extreme caution, but one can trust this bit of his "Auto-analysis": In May, 1873, I became a reporter on the St. Louis _Evening Journal_. In October of that year I married Miss Julia Sutherland Comstock of St. Joseph, Mo., at that time a girl of sixteen. We have had eight children--three daughters and five sons.