Mr. Riley made his work effective through the possession of a sound instinct for appraising his material, combined with a good sense of proportion. His touch grew steadily firmer, and he became more fastidious as the public made greater demands upon him; for while his poems in dialect gained him a hearing, he strove earnestly for excellence in the use of literary English. He has written many poems of sentiment gracefully and musically, and with no suggestion of dialect. Abundant instances of his felicity in the strain of retrospect and musing might be cited. The same chords have been struck time and time again; but they take new life when he touches them, as in “The All-Golden”:-- “I catch my breath, as children do In woodland swings when life is new, And all the blood is warm as wine And tingles with a tang divine.... O gracious dream, and gracious time, And gracious theme, and gracious rhyme-- When buds of Spring begin to blow In blossoms that we used to know, And lure us back along the ways Of time’s all-golden yesterdays!” It is not the farmer alone whose simple virtues appeal to him; but rugged manhood anywhere commands his tribute, and he has hardly written a more touching lyric than “Away,” whose subject was an Indiana soldier:-- “I cannot say, and I will not say That he is dead--He is just away!” He has his own manner of expressing an idea, and this individuality is so marked that it might lead to the belief that he had little acquaintance with the classic English writers. But his series of imitations, including the prose of Scott and Dickens and the characteristic poems of Tennyson and Longfellow, are certainly the work of one who reads to good purpose and has a feeling for style. When he writes naturally there is no trace of bookishness in his work; he rarely or never invokes the mythologies, though it has sometimes pleased him to imagine Pan piping in Hoosier orchards. He is read and quoted by many who are not habitual readers of poetry--who would consider it a sign of weakness to be caught in the act of reading poems of any kind, but who tolerate sentiment in him because he makes it perfectly natural and surrounds it with a familiar atmosphere of reality. The average man must be trapped into any display of emotion, and Mr. Riley spreads for him many nets from which there is no escape, as in “Nothin’ to say, my daughter,” where the subject is the loneliness and isolation of the father whose daughter is about to marry, and who faces the situation clumsily, in the manner of all fathers, rich or poor. The remembrance of the dead wife and mother adds to the pathos here. The old man turns naturally to the thought of her:--