His dramatic success in England is easily explained. He brought to the calm air of literary London, a breath of the great winds of the plain. The more he exaggerated his crashing effects, the louder he roared, the better the English public liked it. When he entered Victorian parlors in his velvet jacket, hip-boots and flowing hair, childhood visions of the “wild and woolly Westerner” were realized and the very bombast of his work was glorified as “typically American.” And yet, for all his overstressed muscularity, Miller is strangely lacking in creative energy. His exuberance and whipped up rhetoric cannot disguise the essential weakness of his verse. It is, in spite of a certain breeziness and a few magnificent descriptions of cañons and mountain-chains, feeble as well as false, full of cheap heroics, atrocious taste and impossible men and women. (See Preface.) One or two individual poems, like “Crossing the Plains” and parts of his apostrophes to the Sierras, the Pacific Ocean and the Missouri river may live; the rest seem doomed to a gradual extinction. From 1872 to 1886, Miller traveled about the Continent. In 1887 he returned to California, dwelling on the Heights, helping to found an experimental Greek academy for aspiring writers. He died there, after a determinedly picturesque life, in sight of the Golden Gate, in 1913. BY THE PACIFIC OCEAN[2] Here room and kingly silence keep Companionship in state austere; The dignity of death is here, The large, lone vastness of the deep. Here toil has pitched his camp to rest: The west is banked against the west. Above yon gleaming skies of gold One lone imperial peak is seen; While gathered at his feet in green Ten thousand foresters are told. And all so still! so still the air That duty drops the web of care. Beneath the sunset’s golden sheaves The awful deep walks with the deep, Where silent sea-doves slip and sweep, And commerce keeps her loom and weaves. The dead red men refuse to rest; Their ghosts illume my lurid West. CROSSING THE PLAINS[3] What great yoked brutes with briskets low, With wrinkled necks like buffalo, With round, brown, liquid, pleading eyes, That turn’d so slow and sad to you, That shone like love’s eyes soft with tears, That seem’d to plead, and make replies, The while they bow’d their necks and drew The creaking load; and looked at you. Their sable briskets swept the ground, Their cloven feet kept solemn sound.