JAMES WHITCOMB BILEY Bt Anna Nicholas HE was a discerning man who declared that a poet is bom, not made. James Whitcomb Eiley is a distin- guished illustration of the truth of the saying, for he is emphatically not a poet of the schools, though many of his productions are of classic beauty and perfection. James Whitcomb Eiley was born to sing. Where he was bom, literally, and when, have an interest beyond that of mere statistics, because environment and conditions often explain the drift of a writer's mind. Biographical dictionaries have fixed 1853 as the date of his birth, but people who have known him long dispute in idle mo- ments the correctness of the date, some insisting that he opened his eyes on the world three or four years earlier. As it is, because of the poet's whim not to satisfy curiosity on this point — he lightly turning the subject when it is mentioned — 1853 will probably stand in the books. Nor is the uncertainty important, for what are a few years more or less **When the heart beats young? And Mr. Riley's heart is young and will be so always. Unkind time has interfered with his phys- ical activity in recent days, but the alert mind, wise with its accumulations of life's experiences, is ready to forget its knowledge and to be one with the children; to believe, with them, in the pixy people ; he is ready to put himself in the place of the youngsters who listened, wide-eyed, to Orphant AnniCj who admired Noey Bixlerj who delighted in Our Hired Manj and Uncle Sidney who told fairy tales and believed them. He has within him the deathless spirit of the child — greatest gift of the gods. What he once wrote of another can be truly said of him :
- ' Turn any chapters that we will.
Read any page, in sooth. We find his glad heart owning still The freshness of his youth."
