SOURCE: Dickey, Marcus. “Vision of His Mission.” In The Youth of James Whitcomb Riley: Fortune's Way With the Poet From Infancy to Manhood, pp. 271-82. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1919.

In the following essay, Dickey describes how as a young man of twenty-seven, Riley had a vision in which he was called to be a voice for “the inarticulate masses.”

Walking one April morning through an orchard with a friend, his eyes on the blossoming trees and his thoughts in the sky, Riley suddenly pitched forward into a post-hole. In the twinkling of an eye the Tennysonian sentiment came to his lips:—

O let the solid ground Not fail beneath my feet Before my life has found What some have found so sweet; Then let come what come may, What matter if I go mad, I shall have had my day. 

The lines, repeated at random, were an innocent...