Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/411

 388 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS The place of the poet's birth was Greenfield, Indiana — a thriving little city now, bnt back in the mid-century it most have been a typical country village. The little flaxen haired, barefooted youngster, absorbed with the sports of childhood, did not give much promise then of his later career, but back to that life the inspiration of many of his poems can be traced. Did he have Greenfield in mind when he wrote of Griggsby's Station, **Back where we used to be so happy and so pore'^t Did he mean Greenfield when he wrote, **The little town of Tailholt is good enough fer me'^T It was there that he knew the delights ^ ^ along the banks of Deer Creek**; there that he went ''up and down the Brandy- wine**; from there that he went Out to Old Aunt Mary's. Again and again his childhood is recalled : ''When life was like a story holding neither sob nor sigh In the olden, golden glory of the days gone by.** The simple life of the little town, prosaic as it may have seemed to others, was rich in its poetic suggestions to him, as time proved, but how did he come by his genius? Who knows? Perhaps his mother was a dreamer of dreams. His portrait of her, in the story of the Old Home FolkSj hints as much : ' ' The boy prone on the floor above a book Of pictures, with a rapt, ecstatic look — Even as the mother's, by the selfsame spell Is lifted, with a light ineffable — As though her senses caught no mortal cry But heard, instead, some poem going by.** Or it may be that his stem lawyer-father, of whom the chil- dren of the family stood rather in awe, had a vein of sentiment and an emotional life back of his practical, sedate outward seeming that descended to and found expression in his son. The higher gifts to man come by ways that are mysterious and dim to mortal sense. It is enough to say that his heritage on both sides of his family is good. He comes of sound American stock. Mr. Biley spent his boyhood and young manhood in Green-