The Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley — Volume 10Riley, James Whitcomb
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The Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley — Volume 10
Riley, James Whitcomb
American essays; American poetry; Short stories, American
With no less approval should the work of Joel
Chandler Harris be regarded: His touch alike is
ever reverential. He has gathered up the bruised
and broken voices and the legends of the slave,
and from his child-heart he has affectionately
yielded them to us in all their eery beauty and
wild loveliness. Through them we are made to
glorify the helpless and the weak and to revel in
their victories. But, better, we are taught that even
in barbaric breasts there dwells inherently the sense
of right above wrong-equity above law-and the
One Unerring Righteousness Eternal. With equal
truth and strength, too, Mr. Harris has treated the
dialectic elements of the interior Georgia country--
the wilds and fastnesses of the "moonshiners." His
tale of Teague Poteet, of some years ago, was
contemporaneous with the list of striking mountain
stories from that strong and highly gifted Tennesseean,
Miss Murfree, or "Charles Egbert Craddock."
In the dialectic spirit her stories charm and
hold us. Always there is strangely mingled, but
most naturally, the gentle nature cropping out amid
the most desperate and stoical: the night scene in
the isolated mountain cabin, guarded ever without
and within from any chance down-swooping of the
minions of the red-eyed law; the great man-group
of gentle giants, with rifles never out of arm's-
reach, in tender rivalry ranged admiringly around
the crowing, wakeful little boy-baby; the return, at
last, of the belated mistress of the house--the sister,
to whom all do great, awkward reverence. Jealously
snatching up the babe and kissing it, she
querulously demands why he has not long ago been
put to bed. "He 'lowed he wouldn't go," is the
reply.
Thomas Nelson Page, of Virginia, who wrote
Meh Lady--a positive classic in the negro dialect:
his work is veritable--strong and pure and
sweet; and as an oral reader of it the doubly gifted
author, in voice and cadence, natural utterance,
every possible effect of speech and tone, is doubtless
without rival anywhere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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