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:—
“You don’t rickollect her, I reckon? No; you wasn’t a year old then!
And now yer—how old air you? W’y, child, not ‘twenty’! When?
And yer nex’ birthday’s in Aprile? and you want to git married that day?
I wisht yer mother was livin’!—but I hain’t got nothin’ to say!
Twenty year! and as good a gyrl as parent ever found!
There’s a straw ketched onto yer dress there—I’ll bresh it off—turn round.
(Her mother was jest twenty when us two run away.)
Nothin’ to say, my daughter! Nothin’ at all to say!”