The San Francisco call., 1898-01-16

THE POEMS AND PROSE ShEICHES OF JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY-Vol- ume I. Neighborly Poems and Dialect Sketches. Scribners. New York.
 7 MEXICAN readers need no intro
 duction to James Whitcomb Riley, H recognized on both sides of the At S lantic as the foremost writer of L that dialect verse which in the
 United States embodies the hu- nor, pathos and tragedy of rural life. In the final article of the volume before us the author, in strong, terse English, vindicates the new school of literature and insists on the necessity for a reverent, scholarly treatment of dialect. But the best vfndicatiOn is to be found In his own poems, which appeal to universal humanity while expressing the yearnings of those sons of the soil who cry with him
 I want plane facts and want plane Of the good oId-fashioned ways, When speech runs free as the songs of
 birds
 Way back in the early days.
 In those early days speech must have been not only as free but as musical as bird song, if we are to judge by Mir. Ri ley, who sings like another Burns the poetry and grace of farm life Could anything be more enticing than the pie ture brought before us in ''Wortermelon Time? Has the glory of the field ever been sung more sweetly than in ''The Clover'-
 And pray to Him still for the strength
 when I die,
 To go out in the clover and tell it good And lovingly nestle my face in It's bloom While my soul slips away on breath of Or. again, has the sense of loss ever been more tenderly expressed than in the dirge for Little Haly''-
 There's sorrow in the wavin' leaves of
 all the apple trees;
 And sorrow in the harvest sheaves, and
 sorrow in the breeze;
 And sorrow in the twitter of the swal-
 lers round the shed;
 And all the song her redbird sings Is
 Little Haly's dead
 But MT. Riley's humor lies very close to his pathos; he has a fellow-feeling for the fiddler whose "playins only mid dim but who loves his instrument with the passion of born artist, for From her strings across her middle to
 the screechin' keys above From her "apern," over bridge" and to
 the ribbon round her throat. She's a wOoin' cooin' pigeon, singing
 Love me" ev'ry note.
 And there is a sly touch worthy of old Lafontaine in the parable of the Tree Toad, who has been "hollerin' all day for rain:
 But fetched hero fetched her
 Cause a little while ago,
 As I kind O set,
 With one eye shet,
 And a singin' soft and low, A voice trapped down on my fevered
 brain,
 A-sayin', ''Ef you'll jest hush I'll rain.' Perhaps MT. Riley's refined mastery of dialect is most fully shown in his prose, and the one sketch in this volume, An Old Settlers Story" is. in It's way, an admirable piece of literary workman ship. Led on by unaffected style, homely language and illustrative detail, the reader unexpectedly lives through vil- lage tragedy, while the accompanying undercurrent of unsatisfied romance is indicated in a few subtle touches In this, the first complete edition of the author S works, Messrs. Scribner will include the contents of the two volumes formerly published under the titles of "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" and "Old-fashioned Roses" The present volume opens with quaintly graceful salutation to Benja- min F. Johnson, the "Hoosier author, in whose personality MT. Riley at first merged his own. A hfe-like portrait also deserves mention.