With portrait by Melander, Chicago, Ill. With portrait by Broadbent & Taylor, Philadelphia, Pa. Maurice Francis Eagan. A Greeting. Sheridan. To Annetta. Paestum. Quatrain. Quotation. Deal Gently with the Erring. Life. A Reply. To John G. Whittier. Opinion of the "Good Old Times." The Farmer's Song. Quotation. The Banshee. The Star in the East. The Rain. Quotation. MATHIS, JULIETTE Estelle. With portrait by N. H. Reed, Santa Barbara, Cal. My Dead. An Invitation. The Valley of Silence. With portrait by Cooper, Westminster, Ind. Decoration Day. Why Sad? The World of Books. Lines. "Dies Ira." Non Dies Ira. "I Think I am Like the Pine Tree." Going to Sleep. HARVEY, MATTHEW JAMES. With portrait by A. P. Drew, Dover, N. H. DAVIS, IDA MAY. With portrait by Marceau & Power, Indianapolis, Ind. Benediction. A Memory. Afterglow. The Rose. Chanson. Evening Song. RUSSELL, AMOS BRYANT. With portrait. "Perfect Through Suffering." An Indian Summer. A Reverie. Some Time. DOLSON, EUGENE C. With portrait by H. B. Lindsley, Auburn, N. Y. Past and Present. A Winter's Night. Two Epitaphs. Bloom and Blight. Two Dreams. Saltus, Edith Lenore Montefiore. Foretaste, W. Wilsey Martin. A Culprit, Charles Henry Luders. THE MAGAZINE OF POETRY. VOL. III. No. 1. JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY. JAMES JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY was born at Greenfield, Indiana. His exact age he leaves his best friends to guess. Were you to ask him he would perhaps tell you that he is this side of forty. Which side is of little matter, for he will never grow old. His boyhood, aside from a gift of humor beyond his years, was in no wise remarkable. His progress at school was discouraging in the extreme. Of it he has written: "It was a matter of eternal wonder how I could belong to the big class in the Fourth Reader. At sixteen I could not repeat the simplest school-boy speech without breaking down, and rather than undertake it I deliberately chose to take a whipping." But that which he loved he learned with but little effort. Music, painting, drawing and poetry seemed to come naturally to him, and the lessons that the seasons taught in wood and field and stream he knew by heart. After his school days, which never extended beyond the "big class," he took to his brush and pencil, and became a sign painter. It was while following this occupation, that he joined the company of patent medicine venders and sign painters, and made the extended tour over the country about which so much has been written. Though it was a profitless venture, yet some of his best poems came from his overflowing soul in those gypsy days. Upon his return he became the local editor of a newspaper and, as he says, "Strangled the poor little thing to death in three months. Then he went back to his paint-brush again, but soon afterwards, obtaining a position with the Indianapolis Journal, he removed to that city and has ever since been engaged in literary work. With success came a desire for self-improvement, and in the last dozen years he has acquired a liberal knowledge of language, literature and history. He is a hard worker, and prefers the unseasonable hours of night for his labor. Often the newsboys are crying the morning papers in the street before he retires. Mr. Riley is a warm hearted, genial, companion able man, entirely free from jealousy and envythe twin accompaniments of little souls. His faults are those that all men the more easily forgive, and which we believe he has now risen above. Mr. Riley began to write poetry almost as soon as he could use a pen, but for a long time he seems to have had no higher ambition than to please himself and to amuse his companions. But the poet, Lee O. Harris, knew and loved the boy, and Benjamin S. Parker, also a poet and a man of good critical judgment, saw in his faulty lines a promise of better things. It was through the encouragement of these men that the young poet was led to a larger faith in himself. He began to write for local papers, notably the Kokomo Tribune, to which he contributed a number of dialect poems, over the name of John C. Walker. It was not until the appearance of “Leonainie," published about 1878 as a newly discovered poem by Edgar A. Poe and accepted by a number of leading literary critics as genuine, that he received recognition. Following this came the dialect poems over the name of "Ben. F. Johnson, from Boon," and the books "The Boss Girl," "Afterwhiles,' Pipes o' Pan," and later a volume of poems by a London house, under the expressive title of "Old Fashioned Roses." As an interpreter of nature Mr. Riley stands next to Burns. His versatility is greater, and in the mastery of the faulty every-day language of his countrymen he never had an equal. His spontaneity is surprising. He is like a tuned instrument upon which some invisible hand is forever playing. His thoughts are chaste, and the human sympathy and pure purpose that runs through all his song is the true index of the man, and also his best and most lasting eulogy. W. W. P. JUNE. O QUEENLY month of indolent repose! I nestle like a drowsy child, and dose 99 66 |