Mrs. Somers: Well, in the first place, I would n't have got you wrought up so." Campbell: 'Well, but if you had! Suppose you had done all that I've done, and that I was up there in your place

sure to fall.' She gathers her train in one hand. Well, then, look the other way!' Campbell turns his face aside and 15 standing on a chair, and would n't let you waits. No, I can't do it.'

leave the room, and would n't get down and walk out, and would n't allow myself to be carried, what should you do?'

Mrs. Somers, who has been regarding him attentively over the top of the fan, which she holds pressed against her face: 'Why, I suppose if you would n't let me help you willingly I should use violence!'

Campbell: 'You witch!' As he makes a wild rush upon her, the curtain, which in the plays of this author has a strict regard for the convenances, abruptly descends.

Harper's Monthly, December, 1886.

JOAQUIN MILLER (1841-1913)

Cincinnatus Heiner Miller

he adopted the Joaquin' later as a pen name was born, according to his own statement, on the line between Ohio and Indiana while his parents were migrating westward. My cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west.' He spent his early boyhood in a frontier settlement east of the Mississippi, and when he was eleven went with his family across the continent in oxen-drawn wagons, arriving in Oregon after seven months. He saw much of frontier life, and, if we may trust his autobiographical narrative, went through a surprising series of adventures with Indians, miners, desperadoes, and finally with the Walker filibustering expedition to Nicaragua. He returned at length to Oregon, picked up a smattering of culture at a mission school, edited a paper which was suppressed for disloyalty at the beginning of the war, studied law for a few weeks, became a frontier judge, wrote Byronic verses, and in 1868 published them in a volume entitled Specimens, published another, Joaquin et al, 1869, and the following year went to San Francisco to join the brotherhood of poets. Disappointed by his reception, he started eastward, and disappointed again in New York, went on to London. After a most discouraging year in the metropolis,- a year devoted almost feverishly to poetic composition and to efforts to secure a publisher, he was enabled in 1871 to bring out his volume Songs of the Sierras. Its reception by the poets and critics of England was enough to turn the head of a far more balanced nature than his. He started in to make poetry his profession, but after the first outburst of surprise the public became more critical. He did not overcome his early crudenesses as it was supposed he would do, but rather tended more and more to cheapness and mediocrity. His later life was a picturesque one. He lived for a time in a log cabin of his own construction in Washington, D .C,. but finally settled in California, which he made his home during his later years. After his first London volume he published in various places no less than twenty-four books of prose and verse, but in America he was not taken with seriousness, and his poetry, save for a few lyrics, is little read.

There is a vein of the flamboyant and the high-falutin in Miller that is apt to disgust his reader so completely that he has no patience to find the really strong pieces that here and there are to be found in his work. The greater part of all he wrote is worthless, but the small residue, poems dealing with the Sierras and the great plains, is thoroughly American and, moreover, really poetic. The lyric Columbus' bids fair to hold its place in the most select American anthologies.