Living away from the centers of culture, with books as exotic things that came from without, almost as from another world, Miller, like many another isolated soul, grew to maturity with the feeling that something holy lay about the creation of literature and that authors, especially poets, were beings apart from the rest of men. Poetry became to him more than an art: it became a religion. "Poetry," he declared in his first London preface, "is with me a passion which defies reason." It was an honest declaration. During the sixties as express messenger in the Idaho gold fields, as newspaper editor, and judge, he wrote verse continually--"I lived among the stars"--but he preserved of all he wrote only a few rather colorless pieces which he published in 1868 with the title _Specimens_. The next year he issued at Portland, Oregon, _Joaquin et al_, a book of one hundred and twenty-four pages. It was his salute to the literary world. He addressed it "To the Bards of San Francisco Bay," and his address sheds light upon the timid young poet: I am as one unlearned, uncouth, From country come to join the youth Of some sweet town in quest of truth, A skilless Northern Nazarine, From whence no good can ever come. I stand apart as one that's dumb: I hope, I fear, I hasten home, I plunge into my wilds again. He followed his book down to what was to him the glorious city of art and of soul that would welcome him with rapture, for was he too not a bard? Says Charles W. Stoddard, "Never had a breezier bit of human nature dawned upon me this side of the South Seas than that poet of the Sierra when he came to San Francisco in 1870."[62]