Talk:The Riddle and Other Stories

Reviews
The New Republic, September 1923:
 * Whether they've all appeared before in magazine I don't know, but here they are at last in a volume, these stories that many readers have longed to have in this form, a book to travel and to stay at home with, to read by the fireside or in some windless corner out of doors. Sometimes Mr. de la Mare begins by placing us in this world, and then beckons us little by little into another world in whose different strangeness he is quite as much at home. Sometimes the transition is swift and smooth from one world to the other, as in the Riddle itself; and once in a while, as in the Count's Courtship, we discover that this world can be as strange as any, that a scruple which seems at first unaccountable may have more mystery than ever after he has made us see it as a natural fruit of insight. Not to the speech of wild animals have the ears of this modern Melampus been opened, but to the speech of houses, old rooms, folds in the hills, times of day, forgotten gardens. They tell him their secrets. And what a language they speak, a language of colors toned down and far away bells: "We were skirting the eastern coast of cliffs, to the very edge of which a ploughman, stumbling along behind his two great horses, was driving the last of his dark furrows. In a cleft far down between the rocks a cold and idle sea was soundlessly laying its frigid garlands of foam." What Mr. de la Mare says of the story Ann was reading is true of many stories in this book: "And the gently-flowing moonlight of the narrative seemed to illumine the white pages.

The Bookman, August 1923:
 * This man is again a magician manipulating adjectives into exquisite and exact service while juggling an abundance of convincing metaphors throughout his almost mystical stories.