Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/78

6o Later Poets were Bums in poetry and Dickens in prose. With his father he often went to the courthouse, where, being allowed to mingle freely with the country people, he came to know the dialect and the hearts and minds of the people who were in after years to be the subject of his poems. For a time he devoted himself to music — the banjo, the guitar, the violin, the drum. In a few weeks I had beat myself into the more enviable position of snare drummer. Then I wanted to travel with a circus, and dangle my legs before admiring thousands over the back seat of a Golden Chariot. In a dearth of comic songs for the banjo and guitar, I had written two or three myself, and the idea took posses- sion of me that I might be a clown, introduced as a character-song- man and the composer of my own ballads. For a time, too, he was a "house, sign, and ornamental pain- ter," covering, he tells us, "all the barns and fences in the State with advertisements." Persuaded by his father, he read law, only to find hinjself running away with a travelling medicine man, whose company was composed, he says, of "good straight boys, jolly chirping vagabonds hke myself. Sometimes I assisted the musical olio with dialect recitations and character sketches from the back step of the wagon." This life suited him; "I laughed all the time." Returning to Greenfield, he entered journalism, and began to publish in various papers elsewhere. Lean and uncertain years followed, till, in 1877, he was invited to take a place on The Indianapolis Journal. In this newspaper he printed his dialect poems by "Benjamin F. Johnson of Boone, " which were welcomed so warmly that a pamphlet edition was sold locally, with the title The Old Swimmin' Hole and 'Leven More Poems (1883). This marks the beginning of his widespread success as a poet of the people, which led to his success as a public reader of his own work. Early in his career he had been given valuable encouragement by the Eastern people's laureate, Longfellow, and in 1887, when he appeared before a New York audience, he was introduced as a "true poet " by the author of The Biglow Papers. By 19 12 schools in many parts of the country celebrated "Riley Day" ; by 19 15 he was honoured by official recognition, the Secretary of the Interior suggesting that one of his poenis be read in each school-house in the land.