The very faults of the poet serve as arguments that he _was_ a poet--a poet born, not a poet made from study of other poets. He was not classic: he was romantic--a poet who surrendered himself to the music within him and did not care. "To me," he declared in his defense of poesy, "the savage of the plains or the negro of the South is a truer poet than the scholar of Oxford. They may have been alike born with a love of the beautiful, but the scholar, shut up within the gloomy walls, with his eyes to a dusty book, has forgotten the face of Nature and learned only the art of utterance."[67] This is one of the keys to the new era that opened in the seventies. It explains the new laughter of the West, it explains the Pike balladry, it explains the new burst of democratic fiction, the studies of lowly life in obscure environments. "To these poets," he continues; "these lovers of the beautiful; these silent thinkers; these mighty mountaineers, far away from the rush and roar of commerce; these men who have room and strength and the divine audacity to think and act for themselves--to these men who dare to have heart and enthusiasm, who love the beautiful world that the Creator made for them, I look for the leaven of our loaf." Miller comes nearer to Mark Twain than to any other writer, unless it be John Muir. True, he is wholly without humor, true he had never been a boy, and in his mother's words had "never played, never had playthings, never wanted them"; yet notwithstanding this the two men are to be classed together. Both are the recorders of a vanished era of which they were a part; both emerged from the material which they used; both wrote notable prose--Miller's _Life Among the Modocs_ and his other autobiographic picturings rank with _Life on the Mississippi_; both worked with certainty in one of the great romantic areas of human history. There is in the poems of Miller, despite all their crudity, a sense of adventure, of glorious richness, of activity in the open air, that is all his own. His Byronism and his Swinburneism were but externals, details of manner: the song and the atmosphere about it were his own, spun out of his own observation and colored by his own unique personality. His own definition of poetry determines his place among the poets and explains his message: "To me a poem must be a picture," and it must, he further declared, be drawn always from Nature by one who has seen and who knows. "The art of poetry is found in books; the inspiration of poetry is found only in Nature. This book, the book of Nature, I studied in the wilderness like a monk for many years." The test of poetry, he maintained, is the persistence with which it clings in the memory, not the words but the picture. Judged by this standard, _Songs of the Sierras_, which is a succession of gorgeous pictures that cling in the imagination, must rank high.