The poets we admire are many; the poets we love are few. One of the traits that endear Riley to his countrymen is his cheerfulness. He is “Sunny Jim.” The south wind and the sun are his playmates. The drop of bitterness mixed in the cup of so many poets seems to have been left out of his life potion. And so, while he does not rouse us with “the thunder of the trumpets of the night,” or move us with the deep organ tones of tragic grief, he never fails to hearten and console. And though tragedy is absent from his verse, a tender pathos, kindred to his humor, is everywhere present. Read over again “The Old Man and Jim,” or “Nothin’ to Say, my Daughter,” or any of his poems on the deaths of children; for a choice that poignant little piece, “The Lost Kiss,” comparable with Coventry Patmore’s best poem, “The Toys,” in which the bereaved father speaks his unavailing remorse because he had once spoken crossly to his little girl when she came to his desk for a good-night kiss and interrupted him at his work. Riley followed the bent of his genius and gave himself just the kind of training that fitted him to do his work. He never had any regular education, adopted no trade or profession, never married and had children, but kept himself free from set tasks and from those responsibilities which distract the poet’s soul. His muse was a truant, and he was a runaway schoolboy who kept the heart of a boy into manhood and old age, which is one definition of genius. He was better employed when he joined a circus troupe or a travelling medicine van, or set up as a sign painter, or simply lay out on the grass, “knee deep in June,” than if he had shut himself up in a school or an office. He did no routine work, but wrote when he felt like it, when he was in the mood. Fortunately the mood recurred abundantly, and so we have about two dozen volumes from him, filled with lovely poetry. Most of us do hack work, routine work, because we can do nothing better. But for the creative artist, hack work is a waste. Creative work, when one is in the mood, is more a pleasure than a toil; and Riley worked hard at his verse-making. For he was a most conscientious artist; and all those poems of his, seemingly so easy, natural, spontaneous, were the result of labor, though of labor joyously borne. How fine his art was perhaps only those can fully appreciate who have tried their own hands at making verses. Some of the things that he said to me about the use and abuse of dialect in poetry and concerning similar points, showed me how carefully he had thought out the principles of composition. He thought most dialect poetry was overdone; recalling that delightful anecdote about the member of the Chicago Browning Club who was asked whether he liked dialect verse, and who replied: “Some of it. Eugene Field is all right. But the other day I read some verses by a fellow named Chaucer, and he carries it altogether too far.”