His knowledge of rural life was intimate, though he knew the farm only as a country-town boy may know it, through association with farm boys and holidays spent in visits to country cousins. Once at the harvest season, as we were crossing Indiana in a train, he began discoursing on apples. He repeated Bryant’s poem “The Planting of the Apple Tree,” as a prelude, and, looking out over the Hoosier Hesperides, began mentioning the varieties of apples he had known and commenting on their qualities. When I expressed surprise at the number, he said that with a little time he thought he could recall a hundred kinds, and he did in fact name more than fifty before we were interrupted.
The whimsicalities and comicalities and the heart-breaking tragedies of childhood he interpreted with rare fidelity. His wide popularity as a poet of childhood was due to a special genius for understanding the child mind. Yet he was very shy in the presence of children, and though he kept track of the youngsters in the houses of his friends, and could establish himself on good terms with them, he seemed uncomfortable when suddenly confronted by a strange child. This was due in some measure to the proneness of parents to exhibit their offspring that he might hear them “recite” his own poems, or in the hope of eliciting some verses commemorative of Johnny’s or Mary’s precocity. His children were country-town and farm children whom he had known and lived among and unconsciously studied and appraised for the use he later made of them. Here, again, he drew upon impressions fixed in his own boyhood, and to this gallery of types he never, I think, added materially. Much of his verse for children is autobiographical, representing his own attitude of mind as an imaginative, capricious child. Some of his best character studies are to be found among his juvenile pieces. In “That-Air Young-Un,” for example, he enters into the heart of an abnormal boy who
“Come home onc’t and said ’at he
Knowed what the snake-feeders thought
When they grit their wings; and knowed
Turkle-talk, when bubbles riz
Over where the old roots growed
Where he th’owed them pets o’ his—
Little turripuns he caught
In the County Ditch and packed