On the whole the English have been right. Not that American literature to be of value must be shaggy and ignorant, a thing only of Pikes and slang and dialect. It means rather that the new period which opened in the seventies demanded genuineness, reality, things as they are, studies from life rather than studies from books; that it demanded not the reëchoing of outworn ideals and measures from other lands, but the spirit of America, of the new Western world, of the new soul of the new republic. And what poet has caught more of this fresh new America than the singer of the Sierras, the singer of the great American deserts, and the northern Yukon? BIBLIOGRAPHY JOAQUIN MILLER. (1841-1913.) _Specimens_, 1868; _Joaquin et al_, 1869; _Pacific Poems_, 1870; _Songs of the Sierras_, 1871; _Songs of the Sunlands_, 1873; _Unwritten History: Life Amongst the Modocs_ (with Percival Mulford), 1874; _The Ship in the Desert_, 1875; _First Families of the Sierras_, 1875; _Songs of the Desert_, 1875; _The One Fair Woman_, 1876; _The Baroness of New York_, 1877; _Songs of Italy_, 1878; _The Danites in the Sierras_, 1881; _Shadows of Shasta_, 1881; _Poems, Complete Edition_, 1882; _Forty-nine: a California Drama_, 1882; _'49: or, the Gold-seekers of the Sierras_, 1884; _Memorie and Rime_, 1884; _The Destruction of Gotham_, 1886; _Songs of the Mexican Seas_, 1887; _In Classic Shades and Other Poems_, 1890; _The Building of the City Beautiful, a Poetic Romance_, 1893; _Songs of the Soul_, 1896; _Chants for the Boer_, 1900; _True Bear Stories_, 1900; _As It Was in the Beginning_, 1903; _Light: a Narrative Poem_, 1907; _Joaquin Miller's Poetry_, Bear Edition, 1909. CHAPTER VII THE TRANSITION POETS The second generation of poets in America, those later singers born during the vital thirties in which had appeared the earliest books of the older school, began its work during the decade before the Civil War. It was not a group that had been launched, as were the earlier poets of the century, by a spiritual and moral cataclysm, or by a new strong tide in the national life. It was a school of deliberate art, the inevitable classical school which follows ever upon the heels of the creative epoch. It came as a natural product of mid-century conditions. America, hungry for culture, had fed upon the romantic pabulum furnished so abundantly in the thirties and the forties. It looked away from the garish daylight of the new land of its birth into the delicious twilight of the lands across the sea, with their ruins and their legends and their old romance.