Dunne is famous over the world as the author of Mr. Dooley's Philosophy, which has been hailed as distinctly an American product, although Hibernian in dialect. Herrick is a professor of English in the University of Chicago, and has written several well wrought-out novels-The Web of Life, The Common Lot, and The Master of the Inn-which deal with modern social problems in and around that great center. Herrick is a native of Cambridge, Mass., and a graduate of Harvard. Norris wrote two realistic novels-The Octopus and The Pit—in a projected series of three on "the epic of the wheat," when death cut short his promising career. His idea was to trace, as it were, the life of the great western cereal from sowing to world-distribution.

The Octopus tells of the sowing and harvesting; The Pit depicts the selling of the grain in the Chicago Board of Trade; the last of the trilogy, which was to be called The Wolf, would have pictured its distribution in Europe in the midst of a Russian famine. Throughout the volumes there runs a large epic suggestion.

Two recent Western writers of adventure are STEWART EDWARD WHITE (1873—), a native of Michigan, whose stories of rugged outdoor life are The Blazed Trail, The Silent Places, The Claim Jumpers, and The Riverman; and JACK LONDON (1876-1916), a native of California, who wrote thrilling stories of action in the open-The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, and The Game.

THE POETS

Edward Rowland Sill (1841-1887).-Edward Rowland Sill was a native of New England, but he lived and wrote in the West. He was born at Windsor, Connecticut, educated at Yale, was a business man in California for some years, returned East and studied at the Harvard Divinity School; he then decided to devote his life to teaching; he first taught in Ohio, then at Oakland, California, and from 1874 to 1882 was Professor of English Literature in the University of California; this position he resigned in 1882 because of failing health, and spent the last four years of his life in Ohio writing for the magazines, chiefly for the Atlantic Monthly. He died in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1887. Nearly all his verse was first published in magazines; a small collection from his poems was printed before his death; since then a three-volume edition has appeared; and finally a complete one-volume edition has made his works more familiar to the general public.

Sill was an idealist of singularly pure and lovable personality. Though he spent most of his life in the West, he was essentially Eastern in his culture and thinking; the strong ethical sensibility of the Puritans was in him, liberalized by modern thought and softened by an instinct for the beautiful in nature and in literature. His poetry reflects the doubts and aspirations of the last century, when science and philosophy were unsettling traditional standards and setting thoughtful men adrift; and yet the deep spiritual note of his best poems has in it the assurance of triumph. There is a steady progress in artistic workmanship and vital power from the youthful poems to the last mature utterances; the restless tone of the earlier and middle periods, in which there are faint echoes of Emerson, Tennyson, and Arnold, becomes at last surer and more flexible; the moral quality is always strong, even when the sensuous verbal melody suggests Keats.

Sill's longest poem is "The Hermitage," which contains much nature description in varying meter and stanza; of moderate length is "The Venus of Milo," an exquisite production in which are blended modern wistfulness and a sensitive appreciation of the charms of classic art. The short poems, including the sonnets, are the best; like most modern poets, Sill could not sustain himself long on the wing. His bestknown poem is "The Fool's Prayer," the story of how the king's jester, bidden in mockery to make a prayer for the frivolous court after the royal feast, utters so earnestly the recurring petition-

Be merciful to me, a fool!

O Lord,

that at last

The room was hushed; in silence rose
The King, and sought his gardens cool,
And walked apart, and murmured low,
"Be merciful to me, a fool."

Along with this striking poem should be mentioned the oftquoted "Opportunity":

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:-
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged

A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.
A craven hung along the battle's edge,

And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel-
That blue blade that the king's son bears,—but this
Blunt thing-!" he snapt and flung it from his hand,
And lowering crept away and left the field.
Then came the king's son, wounded, sore bestead,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,
And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh, he hewed his enemy down,
And saved a great cause that heroic day.

Poems of such quality as these entitle Edward Rowland Sill to be called one of the best of minor American poets.

Eugene Field (1850-1895).—Quite a different kind of singer was Eugene Field, who has won a vast popularity by his appeal to lovers of childhood. He was born in St. Louis, of New England ancestry, spent his boyhood in Vermont, attended Williams College, Knox College, and the University of Missouri, but did not graduate; traveled abroad, and then did newspaper work in several western cities; finally in 1883 he became editor of the "Sharps and Flats" column in the Chicago Daily News, holding this position until his death twelve years later. In this paper first appeared most of the poetry and prose later collected in his complete works. The poems of Field are in three series-A Little Book of Western Verse, Songs of Childhood, and Echoes from the Sabine Farm. The second of these volumes contains the poems by which Field is best known; the third is interesting as the successful effort

of a poet of the people to adapt to democratic taste the verse of the Latin singer Horace.

Eugene Field was a genial, lovable, and humorous companion, fond of his friends, full of sentiment and sympathy, careless of his dollars, and a lover of practical jokes. He made his reputation as a writer for the humorous column of a Chicago paper, into which he daily put a whimsical array of fun and philosophy.

EUGENE FIELD

The mock- seriousness of much that he wrote often deceived his readers, a result which delighted his own soul as well as the more sophisticated of his admirers. In standard literature old ballads and romances appealed to him, and oddly enough, the odes of Horace struck his fancy. A hobby of his was book collecting, out of which grew his habit of adorning copies of his poems in the coloring of ancient manuscripts.

In temperament Eugene Field was distinctly western; he loved the unconventional life of a newer and breezier section of America, and despite his New England lineage, the East was uncongenial to him. His kindly heart, his abounding love for children, his sentiment, and his bubbling joyousness, made him the happiest interpreter of the souls of the wee folk. The pathos of his verse is as prominent as the humor of it, the one shadin into the other; sometimes, indeed, the sentiment is pressed too far, in the manner of Dickens; but, after all, the line between sentiment and sentimentality is hard to keep straight. No other American poet has given us so many

lullabies or ministered so charmingly to the fairyland of the nursery. For a generation children-and grown people too, for that matter-have listened and drowsed to the magic words of "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod," been touched by the pathos of "Little Boy Blue," and made to smile sympathetically by the semi-humorous "Seein' Things at Night." In these poems of childhood Eugene Field has shown himself one of the friendliest souls in American letters; he has, moreover, brought literature and journalism close together.

James Whitcomb Riley (1853-1916). Another popular singer is James Whitcomb Riley, of Indiana, the Hoosier laureate of the common heart. He was born at Greenfield, Indiana, attended the local schools, wrote verses for the newspapers, and through his successful reproduction of the Hoosier dialect gained access to the magazines. He soon became a favorite with readers; as a lecturer and as an interpreter of his poems he has delighted audiences in various parts of the country. He has published a number of volumes of verse, the most popular of which are The Old Swimmin'- Hole and 'Leven More Poems, Neighborly Poems, Rhymes of Childhood, The Book of Joyous Children, and While the Heart Beats Young.

From these titles it is evident that Riley is also a lover of childhood and knows how to put in rhyme the simple emotions of the childish heart. Simplicity and genuine humanness characterize all that he has written, whether he has in mind young or old. He is specially fond of rural life and natural men and women unspoiled by artificial conditions; for such and of such his verse is made. Humor, pathos, and wholesome sentiment form the warp and woof of his poetry, and his philosophy is of the cheerful, common-sense kind. No one has surpassed him in the lifelike portrayal of the people and speech of his own native region. Few poems in a minor key are better known to the American reader of this age than "A Life Lesson" ("There! little girl, don't cry!"), "The Old Man and Jim," "Little Orphant Annie" ("The Gobble-uns 'll git you"), "Ike