_Bret Harte_, _Joaquin Miller_, _Edward Rowland Sill_.--We turn to the poetry of the Far West. Francis Bret Harte (1839-1902), born at Albany, New York, after a varied youth in California won a sudden renown through his “Heathen Chinee” and “Condensed Novels.” His later success as a prolific writer of short stories tended to obscure his talent as a humourist in verse; and even in the present decade, when his death has called fresh attention to the value of his literary work as a whole, his poetry is hardly known as it should be. Probably in the course of years his “East and West Poems” (1871) and “Echoes of the Foothills” (1874) will entertain more readers than they now do in comparison with “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” There is likely to come a time when pioneer life among the gold-mines will appeal less than it does to the present generation; whereas the permanent aspects of external nature, as Harte has caught them in “Crotalus,” can never cease to interest. The details of his life are recounted in another part of this volume. Cincinnatus Hiner Miller (born 1841), another celebrity of the West, was reared in a log-cabin in Indiana. After a few years of life on a farm in Oregon, he went to the gold-fields of California. When he had met almost every kind of experience imaginable, he studied law, and practised in Oregon. In 1870 he brought out a small volume of poems, one of them entitled “Joaquin,” the name of a Mexican brigand, Joaquin Murietta, in whose defence he had already written, and henceforth his pen-name. His volume, “Songs of the Sierras,” for which he at first vainly tried to find a publisher, produced, when finally accepted and issued, a sensation that recalled the days of Byron. His vogue has since declined, though he is still read, a collective edition of his poems having been published in 1897. Much less famous than either Harte or Miller, not having the virility of the former, yet possessing a finer sensibility than the latter, was Edward Rowland Sill (1841-1887), a third poet of the Far West. Sprung from a family in Connecticut, a teacher in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, finally professor of English literature in the University of California, Sill, in “Hermione, and Other Poems,” “The Hermitage, and Later Poems” (1867), “The Venus of Milo, and Other Poems,” published (1888) after his death, sent forth a rill of poetry, slender but pure. In the opinion of his friends and many besides, Sill’s death cut short a poetic career of unusual promise. His poems were collected in 1902, in a single volume, and again in 1906; in the latter edition they are arranged chronologically.