One morning I was drinking my coffee in a little den in the Via Condotti. A very singular-looking man came in and sat down at the little table next to mine. Hearing me speak English with a friend, he addressed me. “You are the Consul at Zurich, are you not? You were pointed out to me the other day in the street. I am Joaquin Miller of California. Let us get acquainted.” I moved my chair and coffee over to his table. I was greatly gratified at meeting a poet who seemed to me to have some of the genius of Byron. His “Songs of the Sierras” have the ring of the master. Last summer I read them in Switzerland. Their freshness, their flavor of the prairie and the mountain, their passionate utterance, took me by storm. What the English said of him, in their extravagant joy at “discovering” a live genius in the wilds of the United States, did not affect me, it was the stirring passion of the verse itself. The buffalo, the Indian scout, the burning prairie, the people of the desert, the women with bronzed arms and palpitating hearts, the men in sombreros, with brave lives, and love worth the dying for--that was what he was writing about, and they were all alive before me. Sitting here at the little white marble table of an Italian café, he seemed all out of place. There was nothing in the surroundings of which this half-wild looking poet-scout of the prairies was a part. His yellow locks, flashing blue eyes, stormy face, athletic form, careless dress, and broad-brimmed hat on the floor by his feet, all told of another kind of life. Much of his talk was cynical in the extreme. He was ridiculing everything, everybody, even himself, and he looked about him as if constantly thinking to grab his hat, bound for the door, and rush over the Tiber with a yell. He hated restraint of any kind whatever--dress, custom, language. Miller was now writing in some little attic in Rome, but none of his friends knew where. He would not tell them; he wanted to be alone. A boy brought us the morning journal, and we talked of newspapers. I asked him what English and American papers he read. He smiled, and answered ironically: “When I want _seriousness_, I read the London _Punch_, and for _truth_, I take the New York _Herald_.” There was no talk that morning with him about poetry, but he was jocose and cynical. He asked me what I was doing. I told him I was getting ready to try my hand at a drama. “Don’t do it--all damned nonsense!” he cried. “Dramas worth anything are not wanted, and if you write in blank verse, as you say you propose, not one actor in five hundred knows how to recite the lines. It must be _mighty plain prose_ for these wind sawyers.”