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 be outnumbered and overwhelmed. The movement is on, and it will not be stopped. Wise men, ambitious men, far-sighted men will not attempt to block it. They will adapt themselves to it, they will co-operate with it, they will direct and further it as the only way in which they may hope to be of any cheerful significance in the era opening before them. The "ruling class," the statesmen, in all nations will find their mission and their honor progressively dependent upon their capacity for bringing the entire body of humanity into one harmonious and satisfactory life.

Now the supreme power of Whitman consists in this: that his spirit works inwardly, like religion, upon other spirits, quickening and preparing them for this general human fellowship, this world society, which to him, as to many of his great predecessors, appeared to be the legitimate far-off consequence of the principles declared by the American fathers. "Cosmopolitanism" has of late suffered many indignities as a word and as a conception; and those who speak of an international society are readily charged with treasonable and anarchical innovation. In the spiritual sense of the word no aspiration is, as a matter of fact, more thoroughly American and traditional than cosmopolitanism. "God grant!" exclaimed Franklin, "that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot any-

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 where on its surface and say, 'This is my country. By statesmen like Washington, Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, or Lincoln this utterance would have been accepted as suggesting the ultimate fruition of the highest statecraft. The diffusion of a spirit among men which will support and make possible such statecraft appeared to writers like Emerson and Whitman as perhaps the central function of the serious man of letters.

"I hate literature," said Whitman, conversing in Camden with colloquial over-emphasis. What he meant was that he rejected the famous "play-theory" of art and looked with disdain upon belles-lettres in their merely recreative and decorative aspects. "Literature is big," he explained on another occasion, "only in one way—when used as an aid in the growth of the humanities—a furthering of the cause of the masses—a means whereby men may be revealed to each other as brothers." Recognizing that "the real work of democracy is done underneath its politics," Whitman conceived of his mission from first to last as moral and spiritual; and nothing could be sillier than the current criticism which derides a sense of mission in the poet and at the same time proudly salutes Whitman as the chief American poet. It is as if one should say, "I am very fond of walnuts, but I don't like the meats." Not a part but the whole of his lifework is permeated with religious and moral intention. What gives to the Leaves of Grass its cumu-

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 lative effect is its many-sided development of a single theme, of which I shall give one more of his conversational descriptions: "I am for getting all the walls down—all of them. . . . While I seem to love America, and wish to see America prosperous, I do not seem able to bring myself to love America, to desire American prosperity, at the expense of some other nation." "But must we not take care of home first of all?" asked Dudley. "Perhaps," replied Whitman, "but what is home—to the humanitarian what is home?"

It is easy and natural to disparage this diffusive humanitarian sentiment as it is to ignore that diffcult central precept of Christianity which prescribes one's feeling towards one's neighbor. Every one knows, for example, Roosevelt's scornful comparison of the man who loves his own country no better than another to the man who loves his own wife no better than another. Roosevelt, who had a great talent for bringing forward and glorifying the simple elementary passions, has had his share of applause. When the applause dies away and reflection begins, it occurs to some of us that the simple elementary passions pretty well look after themselves. No very rare talent is required to commend to the average man the simple elementary passions. He takes to them by a primitive urge of his being as the bull moose takes to fighting and mating. Nature has given them a vigor and hardiness which

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 provides against their extinction. Meanwhile our societies, national and international, do not run as smoothly and efficiently as men who hate waste and confusion desire. They seem to clamor from their discordant and jarring gear for some motive and regulative power other than the simple elementary passions. What nature has overlooked and neglected or inadequately attended to is the development of those feelings which fit men to live harmoniously in complex civil societies. So that the special task for those who would ameliorate our modern world is to bring forward and glorify an order of emotions quite unknown to the Cave Man—a mutual understanding and imaginative sympathy which begin to develop and operate only when the elementary urges of our nature have been checked and subdued by a reflective culture. Over most of the once-called great statesmen of Whitman's period and of our own generation—the Bismarcks, the Disraelis, the Roosevelts—there falls the shadow of great tasks from which they shrank and the darker and still present shadow of a great calamity which their fostering of the elementary passions helped to bring upon us. In the present posture of the world I think we should not scorn so resolute a patriot as Whitman, who had lived through two or three wars, for confessing the growth in himself and for promoting the growth in others of a sense like this:

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There is at least an appearance of inconsistency between this limitless humanitarian sympathy of Whitman's and his enthusiastic nationalism. There is at least an appearance of inconsistency between his enthusiastic nationalism and his resolute individualism. But let us not forget the appearance of fundamental conflict between the multitude of the heavenly host crying peace on earth and the words of him they heralded saying, "I came not to bring peace but a sword." The exploration of the ground between these opposites, the reconciliation of jarring antinomies, is a task from which statesmen shrink. It is precisely the master task of the poetic and religious imagination. Whitman, as the opening lines of his book declare, recognized it as the very heart of his theme:

There is the mystery which enchanted him and

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 which perplexes us still—the mystery of the coexistence of personal freedom with social authority. He believed in both, just as for centuries men have believed in the coexistence of free-will with foreknowledge absolute. No one has a right to call his reconciliation of the individual with society inadequate who has not taken the trouble to hear the whole of his song and its commentaries in "Democratic Vistas" and "Specimen Days"; for part supports part, and the whole is greater than the sum of them. No other poet exhibits himself so inadequately in extracts. One gets nearly all of Gray in the "Elegy"; but one can no more get all of Whitman in "O Captain! My Captain" than one can get all of a modern symphony in the sound of the flutes or oboes. Whitman is not primarily a melodist. His strength is in the rich interweaving of intricate and difficult harmonies.

In the evolution of his work, he was seeking a concord of soul and body, individual and society, state and nation, nation and the family of nations, some grand chord to unite the dominant notes of all. In his quest for this harmony he clothes himself in his country as in a garment; he becomes America feeling out her relations with the world. I seem to distinguish in his poems three great successive movements or impulses corresponding roughly to the three periods of the national life in which he had his being. The first is a movement of individualistic expansion corresponding to the

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 period before the Civil War. The second is a movement of concentration corresponding to the period of the war. The third is a resumed movement of "individualistic" expansion following the war, and spiritualized by it."it. [sic]

It can hardly be too much emphasized that Whitman and America went through their adolescence together and that the arrogance of his advent in poetry matches the defiant attitude of the young republic. Born at West Hills, Long Island, May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman had a lively consciousness of his inheritance from the French and American revolutions. In his boyhood he had actually been touched by Lafayette. He knew an old friend of Tom Paine's. His own father, though an uneducated man, had caught the free-thinking habit of the eighteenth century. As he grew towards manhood, he felt stirring around him that intoxicating welter of radical enthusiasms and rosy idealisms which in the forties and fifties was loosely described as Transcendentalism, and which remains to this day the most variously fascinating and fragrant blossoming of mind that America has exhibited. It was a delighted movement of emancipation from the old world and her unholy alliances. It was still more a resolute affirmation of faith in the new world and her unexplored possibilities—faith in the resources of nature and the capacity of man to appropriate them. Inspiriting voices were in the air, and every voice cried in one fashion or another: "Trust

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 thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string. AccceptAccept [sic] the place the divine Providence has found for you; the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great men have always done so and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being."

In his roving early days as teacher, printer, editor; reading his Dante and Shakespeare in a wood by the sea; visiting New Orleans and wandering home again by the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, Whitman heard these voices of his age pealing in his ear with an ever more imperative summons, "Trust thyself." And Whitman resolved to trust himself, soul and body, and to trust his time and place, and to commit himself for better or for worse to the society of his contemporaries and the spiritual current flowing beneath American events. There has been much discussion of Whitman's indebtedness at this point to the inspiration of Emerson. It seems clear on the one hand that Whitman sent a copy of his edition of 1855 to Emerson; that in his edition of 1856 he printed Emerson's letter of acknowledgment and spoke of him as "friend and master"; and that in the conversations of his later years with Traubel he repeatedly talked of Emerson with admiration and reverence. It is clear, on the other hand, that Emerson looked upon Whitman as a representative of the new America, for

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 whom he had in some sense prepared the way, and that on July 21, 1855, he wrote to the then almost unknown poet the following memorable letter:

Now Whitman's "free and brave thought," his determination to trust himself, body and soul, impelled him in the first gush of his self-expression to

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 glorify his earthy and instinctive impulses with a flamboyance which Emerson and many other critics were to condemn as distasteful, shocking, or even dangerous. The powerful virtue in the chants before the war, the virtue for the sake of which Emerson overlooked whatever in them he distasted, was their "fortifying and encouraging" individualism. It is an individualism of adolescent America, unchecked by political experience, modified and colored by emotional attachments to the American scene and the American actors. It is such a passion as made such an indigenous individual as Thoreau love Walden Pond and refuse to pay his taxes. It is an individualism further tempered, however, from the first by a profound sense of the general human brotherhood and a hatred of unearned special privilege. Heir of the Revolutionary Era, Whitman is an equalitarian of a sort. "By God," he exclaims, "I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms." But for bringing in the reign of Equality he confides in men rather than in political mechanisms. "Produce," he asserts, "Produce great persons, the rest follows." He is the Declaration of Independence incarnate. He desires followers but only such as are moved by inner impulse; he will not have clubs studying him nor "schools" trooping after him. Markedly like Emerson and Thoreau in this respect, he is wary of organizations which prescribe the conduct of the individual and relieve him of his personal

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 danger and responsibility. He will stand or fall in his own strength. He is wary of organized majorities. Almost in the spirit of Washington he warns against the savageness and wolfishness of parties, so combative, so intolerant of the idea of equal brotherhood and the interests of all. "It behooves you," he declared, "to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them." "I am a radical of radicals," he repeats from youth to grey old age. Beside this utterance one should place his golden words to his biographer Traubel: "Be radical; be radical; be not too damned radical." Despite such cautionary modifications, however, one may say that Whitman's primary impulse is one of revolt against whatever deprives the simple separate person of his right to freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

But the second movement of Whitman's mind proves him a far more complex phenomenon than most of the critics have acknowledged. Mr. George Santayana represents him as a kind of placid animal wallowing unreflectively in the stream of his own sensations. This view of him may indeed be supported by reference to certain of his passages which express with unwise exuberance his delight in the reports of his senses. The unwisdom of his exuberance with reference to the sexual life, for example, is pretty nearly demonstrated by the number of critics whose critical faculty has been quite upset

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 by it; so that they can find nothing significant in this prophet of the new world but his shamelessness. "Hold off from sensuality," enjoined Cicero (who, by the way, was not a Victorian) "for, if you have given yourself up to it, you will find yourself unable to think of anything else." This precept rests upon physiological and psychological facts which Whitman's experiments in heliotherapy have not altered. To put a serpent in a show-window does not blunt its fangs. But to represent Whitman as exclusively or finally preoccupied with the life of the senses is not to represent him whole. It is to ignore a fact which flames from the completed Leaves of Grass, namely, that he is one of the "twice-born"—that he had a new birth in the spirit of the Civil War and a rebaptism in its blood. His book as it now stands is built around that event, and the martyred President is the palpitating heart of it. That Whitman emerged from the warm shallows of his individual sensibility, that he immersed himself in the spiritual undercurrents of the national life,—this significant alteration of his position is established by his conduct and temper in the war.

Through the long agony of the struggle, Whitman went about the military hospitals, nursing the sick and wounded from every state without exception; with malice toward none, with charity for all, tenderly compassionate toward Northerner and Southerner alike. In his "Notes of a Hospital Nurse" he records his affectionate ministrations to

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 two brothers mortally wounded in the same battle but on opposite sides; and he remarks almost as if he himself were a neutral above the conflict. "Each died for his cause." The accent of his compassion recalls the perplexed sadness of that touching passage in the Second Inaugural where Lincoln reflects that "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other." Almost in the manner of an outraged pacifist, Whitman, after describing an attack on a hospital train, comments as follows: "Multiply the above by scores, aye hundreds—light it with every lurid passion, the wolf's, the lion's lapping thirst for blood—the passionate boiling volcanoes of human revenge for comrades, brothers slain—with the light of burning farms, and heaps of smutting, smouldering black embers—and in the human heart everywhere black, worse embers—and you have an inkling of this war." Yet despite his abhorrence of cruelty and despite his compassion for suffering, Whitman's sympathy does not blunt the edge of his judgment. He is no more a pacifist or a neutral than Lincoln himself. Though his eyes are fixed daily on the dreadful cost of his moral and political faith, he remains a passionate and unrelenting Unionist. Like the great captain whom he was to salute as "the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands," he has sunk his personal sensibilities in the larger and more precious life of the nation. Till the war is over he cries with full

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 heart: "Thunder on! stride on, Democracy! Strike with vengeful stroke." In his vision of the indispensable One encompassing the Many he salutes the sacrificial flag with an out-flaming national loyalty incomprehensible to the conscientious objector:

In the era of reconstruction after the war Whitman reconstructs his individualism in the light of his allegiance to the Union. Musing deeply of "these warlike days and of peace return'd, and the dead that return no more," he hears a phantom with stern visage bidding him chant the poem "that comes from the soul of America, chant me the carol of victory." Brooding once again upon the old mystery, why Lincoln wished to preserve the Union, what justified those rivers of fraternal blood, he bursts into this explanation of the ultimate purpose

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 of a modern democratic state, and offers it, as will be noted at the end, to America militant:

There is a definition of purpose which cuts into Treitschke's cold-blooded assertion that "the individual has no right to regard the State as a means for attaining his own ambitions in life." And it cuts with equal keenness into the conception of those younger international, revolutionary statesmen who, ignoring individuals, propose to deal with classes, legislate for one class, and institute world-wide

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 class-war. But let us admit, also, that it strikes quite as deeply into the pretensions of any class whatsoever, which governing in its own interest, becomes the oppressor and parasite of the body politic. These stalwart American individuals whom Whitman demands in immense numbers as the counterpoise to the levelling State cut all classes to pieces. "The pride and centripetal isolation of a human being in himself," he says in one of his timely pregnant passages, is the check, "whereby Nature restrains the deadly original relentlessness of all her first-class laws."

There is no reconciliation of this haughty individualism with his haughty nationalism possible except through faith—faith to believe that the American type of democratic government is the form best adapted to the production of the largest possible number of great and happy individuals. Rise to that faith, and you find within reach a principle of reconciliation between your proud nationalism, and that profound and sacred instinct in you which impels you to join hands with men and women who live under other flags yet belong to the same great civil society. Keep your eyes fixed on the true goal of national life and you may keep your national loyalty even in a league of nations. You may say in all honesty and with the full ardor of patriotic exaltation: "O America, because you build for mankind, I build for you."

Whitman is not the altogether intoxicated be-

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 liever in democracy that he is usually made out to be. We may as well embrace this faith, such is the entirely sober argument of "Democratic Vistas," because the experiment is going to be tried, whether we like it or not. The deep currents of the times set that way: "Whatever may be said in the way of abstract argument, for or against the theory of a wider democratizing of institutions in any civilized country, much trouble might well be saved to all European lands by recognizing this palpable fact (for a palpable fact it is), that some form of such democratizing is about the only resource now left. That, or chronic dissatisfaction continued, mutterings which grow annually louder and louder, till, in due course, and pretty swiftly in most cases, the inevitable crisis, crash, dynastic ruin. Anything worthy to be called statesmanship in the Old World, I should say, among the advanced students, adepts, or men of any brains, does not debate today whether to hold on, attempting to lean back and monarchize, or to look forward and democratize—but how, and in what degree and part, most prudently to democratize."

On the occasion of his centenary celebration there was much inconclusive discussion as to whether, had he lived in these days, he would have been a "Bolshevist."

If Whitman had lived at the right place in these years of the Proletarian Millennium, he would have been hanged as a reactionary member of the bour-

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 geoise: First, he distrusts schemes of doctrinaires instituting a new order in sudden and violent contravention of nature, as these lines witness:

Secondly, he had a realistic scheme of his own for stabilizing democratic society by absorbing the upper and lower economic strata into a renovated and homogeneous middle: "The true gravitation hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort—a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth. As the human frame, or indeed, any object in this manifold universe, is best kept together by the simple miracle of its own cohesion, and the necessity, exercise and profit thereof, so a great and varied nationality, occupying millions of square miles, were firmest held and knit by the principle of the safety and endurance of the aggregate of its middling property holders. So that, from another point of view, ungracious as it may sound, and a paradox after what we have been saying, democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor, the ignorant, and on those out of business. She asks for men and women with occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the bank and with some cravings for litera-

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 ture, too; and must have them." A passage by no means devoid of political sagacity.

Thirdly, Whitman is not in the least content as a final term of progress with the material civilization which he expects and demands as the stage following the founding of fundamental institutions and laws. "The fruition of democracy, on aught like a grand scale," he declares with emphasis, "resides altogether in the future." Like most imaginative writers who have striven to present a vast and complex vision, he has been grievously misunderstood. His great songs are songs of faith, winged with anticipative ecstasy, outflying the literal and the humdrum, soaring down that far vista at the end of which a "sublime and serious Religious Democracy" will sternly take command. He has been described as a noisy braggart about himself and his country; but he is complacent with hope, not fulfillment. What he is bragging about is God, that power not ourselves working through man and nature and mysteriously bringing vast designs to pass in spite of all that the almost infinite wickedness and ignorance of man can do to thwart him.

Finally, Whitman would have been hanged by a canny council of workmen because of the germs of a new aristocracy lurking in his "great persons," his powerful free individuals, and pervading, indeed, all that he says or sings. He is a reader of newspapers and passes for a shallow fellow with those who do not also observe that he is a de-

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 vourer of bibles and epics. He is called a blind and silly optimist by those who overlook the fact that he has made a clean breast of more evil in himself and his countrymen than any other writer had admitted as existing; and his optimism is said to depend upon his championship of vulgarity and mediocrity. It is true that he seems to rely a great deal upon the "divine average." But, then, his standards are not so low. He is not such a facile leveler. His specimen of the average man, what he means by the average man, is Ulysses Grant, is Abraham Lincoln. Whitman adores America because she produces such men, and he clamors for shoals of them—poets, orators, scholars—of the same bulk and build and aplomb. He will not be satisfied till he sees a hundred million of such superb persons, such aristocrats, walking these States. He is a democrat with an exorbitant thirst for distinction, of heroic mold, elate with a vision of grandeurs and glories, of majesties and splendors—like every good democrat with a spark of imagination.

I have set forth some of the main points in Whitman's system of ideas, but I recall his warning: "Do not attempt to explain me; I cannot explain myself." And certainly his service to us is neither contained nor containable in an argument. He gives us the sustaining emotion which prevents argument from falling to pieces of its own dryness. He fulfills the promises and justifies the faith of demo-

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 cratic society in his own characteristic fashion, by being a great individual, by being a great poet. He chiefly serves our society as poets do: "We do not fathom you—we love you." He is a lover himself and the cause of love in others.

How do I know that he is a great poet? Not merely because such judges as Emerson, Tennyson and Swinburne have acknowledged his power. Not because he has achieved a wide international reputation and translations into French, Dutch, Danish, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. The great court of glory has pronounced unmistakeably in his favor; and this award fortifies, to be sure, the individual judgment. But there is another very simple test, which for some reason or other, is seldom applied to our contemporary verse. What is the purpose and the effect of great poetry—of Homer, The Psalms, Beowulf, the Song of Roland, the Divine Comedy, Richard III, Paradise Lost? It is to raise man in the midst of his common life above the level of his ordinary emotion by filling him with a sentiment of his importance as a moral being and of the greatness of his destiny. Does Whitman's poetry accomplish that end? It does, and it will continue to do so with increases of power as the depth and sweep of his book, its responses to a wide range of need, become familiar in the sort of daily exploration through a number of years, in dull times and crucial, which such a book can repay.

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 It is ungracious to say that one can measure the magnitude of Whitman by comparing him with his successors in the free verse movement; yet a word of comparison is almost unavoidable. The way to get at the matter is to ask, for example, whether the Spoon River Anthology of Mr. Masters fills one with a sentiment of one's importance as a moral being and of the greatness of one's destiny. Does there not fall over most of the figures in our late poetic renaissance "the shadow of great events from which they have shrunk?" Whitman still towers above his American successors as Pike's Peak towers above its foothills; and not merely by the height of his great argument and the lift of his passion but also—though they surpass him in small subtleties and superficial finish—by the main mastery of his instrument, the marshalling of his phrases, the production of the poetic hypnosis, and the accent and winning freshness of his voice. I have spoken of his theme and the larger aspects of his emotion, and have not space to exhibit his surging cumulative effects:

But I should like to leave in a few lines a taste of the quality of his voice, responding first to simple rapture in the common loveliness of the natural

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 world. Most of us ordinary people feel it when we are young and happy, but in Whitman it is a perennial incitement to benediction. No other American poet communicates so abundantly the sheer joy of living:

Add this impression of a prairie sunset:

And that exquisite line:

Then for his note in compassion, read "Reconciliation," remembering that here is no feigned emotion, but the very spirit of the man bending above some Rebel soldier in the old Washington days—the bearded angel of spiritual Reconstruction:

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Or read "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," another picture of the dead soldier, ending with a swift mystical vision of his transfiguration by the love which passes understanding:

There is more of the high pity and terror of war, more of the valor and tenderness that come straight from the magnanimous heart, in Whitman's battle chants and dirges than in all our other war poetry put together.

"In Homer and Shakespere," says Whitman truly, one will find a "certain heroic ecstasy, which, or the suggestion of which, is never absent in the works of the masters." That heroic ecstacy is present in Whitman himself. There is not a page of him in

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 which he does not impart it. The continuous miracle is that he manages to impart it with only a line here and there in the familiar grand style of the masters, and these remain, one suspects, by his inadvertence as in his salutation to a tawny headed warrior:

These are lines that the old masters would recognize as in their style; but the heroic ecstasy lives too in the new style of his own:

Or consider his salute: "To Him That Was Crucified":

In nothing does a man measure himself more decisively than in his judgment of other men. Whit-

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 man has an instinct and talent for recognizing the heroic in literature, in history, among his own contemporaries. He recognizes it in Christ, in Lincoln, in the nameless crumpled corpse amid the débris of battle; and he responds to it with the adoration of a kindred spirit. This is a decisive test of his quality. This instinct keeps him near the central stream of our national life, an unperturbed and reassuring pilot in misty weather. In recognition of this virtue in him I choose for my last word this line of his:

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Joaquin Miller was a picturesque figure on the American scene for more than forty years. The romantic life which he had conceived and which he had, in considerable measure, enacted, he recorded in both verse and prose, with due regard for the attention of posterity. Though much of his work is a genuine conquest, he wrote too easily and he wrote too much. In the summer of 1921, only eight years after his death, though occasional curious pilgrims visited his home, The Hights, above San Francisco Bay, and carried off a stone from his monument to Moses, the Law-Giver, booksellers of a dozen shops in the cities that fringe the bay looked up with surprise when one inquired for a copy of his works, and replied that they had none. It is not strange that popular interest refuses to float a six-volume edition of Miller. But our literature is not so rich in distinctive national types that we can afford to let this poetical pioneer fade, as he is now in danger of fading, into a colorless

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 shadow like the once famous scouts that accompanied Fremont into the West.

He is, to be sure, difficult to fix for an adequate portrait, because in his time he played several parts; and he himself was never quite sure in which of his various costumes and poses he would most adorn the national gallery. An emigrant from the Middle Border, a gold-hunter of the Far West, an Indian fighter, a frontier judge, he first rose above the horizon, in 1871, with assistance and cheers from England, as the long-haired, top-booted "poet of the Sierras." Even at the outset of his career, he was not quite satisfied with that rôle. His own early aspiration was rather to be known as "the American Byron;" and, in keeping with that high calling, he shook off the dust of his native land, wandered for a time in "exile," and bore through Italy and the Aegean Isles the pageant of his bleeding heart. Following his personal contact with the Pre-Raphaelites in London, this impressionable mountaineer of the new world discipled himself for a brief period in the early 'seventies to Swinburne and the Rossettis, was intensely "æsthetic," and contemplated devoting himself to the Orient. Returning to America about 1875, he made through his middle years numerous ventures in prose fiction and drama, ranging all the way from the Forty-Niners and the Indians of the Pacific slope to fast life in New York and to the more or less autobio-

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 graphical affairs of the artist Alphonso Murietta in Italy (The One Fair Woman). In what we may call his final period, after his return to California in the middle 'eighties, there grew strong in him a sense that he was the leader of a native poetical movement, a spiritual seer with Messianic or at least prophetic mission, and in the flowing hair and beard of his last years, stalking majestically under the trees which he had planted by his monuments on. The Hights, and gazing dreamily out over the Pacific, he looked the part.

Now, whatever one may think of Miller's actual contribution to poetry or to prose fiction, this evolution of an Indian fighter into the Moses of the Golden Gate is an extraordinary phenomenon. Considered merely as a detached individual, he is abundantly interesting to the biographer. But he repays sympathetic curiosity most generously perhaps when one regards and studies him as a register of the power exerted upon the individual by the American environment and the national culture, even at their thinnest and crudest. To study him in this fashion, the first requisite is a more coherent account of his career than has hitherto been available. Joaquin Miller was his own principal hero, but by a singular fatality his adventures have never been adequately written. Certain scenes and events he himself sketched repeatedly; but concerning many passages of his history he was extremely reticent. What is more serious, he had no steady narrative power.

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 Lifelong an adventurous rover, in love with action, he finds it next to impossible to stick to the thread of his story. As soon as he grasps the pen, he overflows with sentiment and moralization, and he riots in description. Consequently his longer poems frequently produce the effect of panorama, and the feeling which they present remains obscure till the shifting pictures are connected and explained by the events of his own life.

To the student of American culture, the case of Joaquin Miller is the more valuable from the fact that he did not—like Bret Harte, for example—put on the frontier as a literary garment, after an eastern upbringing. By birth and ancestry he belonged in the great migration which settled the Middle Border and the Far West. He was born in 1841, in a covered wagon, "at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio." His mother, Margaret Witt, of Dutch stock from North Carolina, and his father, Hulings Miller, of Scotch stock from Kentucky, were married in Indiana; and after some oscillation between Indiana and Ohio, gravitated slowly westward for a decade through the Miami Reservation and up along the banks of the Wabash and the Tippecanoe rivers, before they heard a clear call to follow the overland trail to the coast. Meanwhile they made various cabin homes for their young family. The mother cooked and sewed and wove and spun. The father worked his little clearings, failed as storekeeper, served as

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 magistrate, and kept school for the children of the wilderness. It was a rough life, but every reference of Miller to his childhood indicates that it was in many respects a good and happy life; and every reference to his parents is marked by a tenderness without condescension. These simple people were impecunious, restless, and not very shrewd—rather sentimental and visionary. But they were honest and pious, with the pacificism of the Quaker discipline and the abolitionism of Horace Greely; they were loyal to one another and gentle and affectionate in all the family relationships; they were kindly in their intercourse with the Indians of the Reservation; and they were hospitable with their meager shelter to wanderers less fortunately circumstanced. Most of the parents' traits ultimately reappeared in the son, from their hospitality to their turn for roving.

The migratory influences from his immediate family were re-enforced by the spirit of the age. The Millers were not alone in finding it difficult to "settle down" in the eighteen-forties. It was an expansive and exploratory epoch in both the physical and the intellectual senses. The East was in a philosophical and social ferment. Descendants of the Puritans, corporeally resident in Concord, were extending their mental frontiers to Greece and India, and in 1841 Emerson published the first series of his essays, "striking up" for a new world. It is not clear that these expansive utterances promptly reached the Indiana settlement. But between

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 and 1844 Fremont started a movement which was the material complement of Transcendentalism by his series of bold expeditions to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon, and California. Fremont's account of these explorations Hulings Miller borrowed from an Indian agent and read in the evenings to his assembled family. "I was never so fascinated," says Joaquin, "I never grew so fast in my life. Every scene and circumstance in the narrative was painted in my mind to last, and to last forever." The hide of the "woolly white horse" celebrated in Fremont's presidential campaign is exhibited to this day in Miller's home in California; and it may be mentioned here that Fremont's guide, the hunter and Indian fighter Kit Carson, is the hero of one of Miller's most readable poems. In 1845 Texas was admitted to the Union, and Sam Houston, another of the poet's western heroes, was elected to the United States Senate. At about this time the Mormons, whom he was to commemorate in The Danites, were drifting westward through Illinois and Missouri; and in 1847 Brigham Young led the faithful into the valley of the Great Salt Lake. In 1849 the cry—"Gold is discovered in California!"—ran like prairie fire among our middleborderers, and doubled the attraction of the full section of land offered to each settler in Oregon, in a bill introduced by Senator Linn of Missouri. By 1850, still another of Miller's heroes, the enigmatic William Walker, was in California, soon to be pre-

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 paring his filibustering excursions into Mexico and Nicaragua. To add the last attraction, General Joe Lane, once a pupil of Hulings Miller in the sugar camps of Indiana, had been appointed Governor of Oregon.

The multiplied appeals of the Far West had become irresistible. As soon as they could equip themselves for the journey, three years after the discovery of gold, the Millers started for the promised land. With a presentiment on his father's part that it would some day be a pleasure to go over the record, Joaquin, then in his eleventh year, kept a journal of the great expedition. Though this unfortunately was lost, the poetic residuum of his impressions is preserved in "Exodus for Oregon" and "The Ship in the Desert." As he recalled their adventure many years later, they set out in wagons on the seventeenth of March, 1852; in May, they crossed the Missouri above St. Joe, where they found the banks for miles crowded with tents of the emigrants; followed the Platte River; threaded Fremont's South Pass over the Rockies; rested at Salt Lake City; skirmished with the Indians in the desert; descended to the head waters of the Snake River; crossed the Cascade Mountains at The Dalles; and, after seven months and five days, ended their march of three thousand miles in Oregon, near the middle of the Willamette Valley—"the most poetic, gorgeous and glorious valley in flowers and snow-covered mountains on the globe."

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100 We were lobbying the governor to call for a special session.

Okay. Does November 18th sound about right, because that was the day that Georgia was supposed to complete the audit and recount? Does that sound about right, November 18th?

That date range sounds around there.

Did you official—was this your rally in Atlanta at the Capitol? Was it a Stop the Steal rally?

It was a Stop the Steal rally.

Did Women for America First have a role in this event?

No. However, at one point in Georgia, and I don't know if it was in this series of events or later that—

The Witness. Is that a reporter?

. I think it's maintenance looking to see if someone's in here.

. Sorry about that.

. Sorry about that. We apologize.

. Can you please continue with what you were saying?

The Witness. I think I was saying—I'm sorry.

. No, I'm sorry.

We apologize for the record, ma'am.

 * BY :

Just to clarify, we were talking about whether the event on November 18th at the Capitol was with Women for America First.

Definitely not.

Okay. When you were having this event, were you coordinating with the Trump campaign at this time?


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 Miller's enthusiasm for the scenery of Oregon is only equalled by his enthusiasm for the new settlers. "The vast multitude," he declares, that fought their way across the plains in the face of cholera, hostile Indians, famine, and drouth, "was, as a rule, religious, and buried their dead with hymns and prayers, all along the dreary half year's journey on which no coward ever ventured, and where the weak fell by the wayside, leaving a natural selection of good and great people, both in soul and body."

It was about two years after the establishment of the Millers in Oregon that Joaquin's independent adventures began. They had cultivated a little land, bought a few cows and sheep and hens, and were running a tavern in a small way. The father and elder brother were now absent teaching school, and Joaquin and his younger brother Jimmy were left with their mother to look after the place. Stories brought up from the mining camps of California by pedlars and itinerant preachers had for some time been making him restless; and it had been conceded, he says, that he was ultimately to be allowed to seek his fortune in the wicked and dangerous territory to the southward. In his fourteenth year, anticipating the parental consent, he ran away, and joining a party of miners who were opening a placer claim in a wooded gulch by the Klamath River, just below the border between Oregon and California, he offered his services as cook and dishwasher. Here began his more intimate acquaintance

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 with the tougher and more miscellaneous element of the western population which was streaming through the Golden Gate—the Australians, the European adventurers, the Mexicans, the Chinese, and questionable wanderers from eastern cities. And here, if his memory is to be trusted, he wrote his first song, in celebration of an adjutant cook's marriage to a woman from Australia.

Joaquin was at this time small for his age, slender, pale, frail-looking, with hair of the color of "hammered gold," reaching to his shoulders. The camp diet of bacon and beans did not agree with him and his first mining experience was terminated by a serious attack of scurvy. He was nursed back to health in Yreka by Dr. Ream and a "kind little Chinaman;" and then was taken by a mysterious stranger to another camp for the winter by the forks of several little streams which flow into the Klamath River from the north of Mt. Shasta. Here, at a later period, he laid the scene of The Danites—"my famous play but have always been sorry I printed it, as it is unfair to the Mormons and the Chinese." The tall stranger with whom he spent the winter is another of his heroes whom at this time he seems to have regarded with unqualified adoration. He figures so largely and mysteriously in his work that he requires identification. In the introduction to the collected poems he is described merely as "the Prince," and is said to have gone "south," in the spring of 1855. But in

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 the Life Among the Modocs, 1873, he is represented as a very handsome and romantic professional gambler of great courage and chivalrous nature who was generally understood to be a prince, but who, after fighting with Walker in Nicaragua, acknowledged himself to be only plain James Thompson, an American. In 1876, Miller dedicated his First Fam'lies of the Sierras as follows: "To my old companion in arms, Prince Jamie Tomas, of Leon, Nicaragua." But that this "Prince Jamie Tomas" was the James Thompson of "Life Among The Modocs and the mysterious stranger of the autobiographical sketch is made clear at last by a footnote to the poem called "Thomas of Tigre," in the fourth volume of the Bear Edition.

After the departure of "the Prince," the most influential friend of the strange boyhood days on Mt. Shasta was another mysterious figure, Joseph De Bloney, whom Miller met in the spring of 1855. In an apparently serious sketch of him, included in Memorie and Rime, De Bloney is described as "a Californian John Brown in a small way." According to this account, he was of an old noble Swiss family, and had probably crossed the plains with Fremont under an impulse similar to that which animated Brigham Young in Utah and Walker in Nicaragua—an impulse to found a new state. "His ambition was to unite the Indians about the base of Mt. Shasta and establish a sort of Indian republic, the prime and principal object of which was

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 to set these Indians entirely apart from the approach of the white man, draw an impassable line, in fact, behind which the Indian would be secure in his lands, his simple life, his integrity, and his purity. . . . It was a hard undertaking at best, perilous, almost as much as a man's life was worth to befriend an Indian in those stormy days on the border, when every gold-hunter. . . counted it his privilege, if not his duty to shoot an Indian on sight. An Indian sympathizer was more hated in those days, is still, than ever was an abolitionist. . . . De Bloney gradually gathered about twenty-five men around him in the mountains, took up homes, situated his men around him, planted, dug gold, did what he could to civilize the people and subdue the savages. . . . But he had tough elements to deal with. The most savage men were the white men. The Indians, the friendly ones, were the tamest of his people. These white men would come and go; now they would marry the Indian women and now join a prospecting party and disappear for months, even years. At one time nearly all went off to join Walker in Nicaragua."

Under the influence of this odd character, young Joaquin seems for the time to have forgotten the Oregon homestead, and to have embraced the dream of a little Indian republic on Mt. Shasta. Between 1855 and 1859 he represents himself as living in the shadow of the mountains with De Bloney and the Indians and "Indian Joe," a scout and horsetrader

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 of German birth, who had been with Fremont, and who furnished Miller some of the materials for his poems. He was also on intimate terms with the Indian Chief Blackbeard, who, he remarks in Memorie and Rime, had a very beautiful daughter, and gave him a "beautiful little valley," where he built a cabin, and "first began to write." According to Life Among the Modocs, a romance with an autobiographical core, he married the chief's daughter and became eventually the leader in the movement to unite the tribes in an Indian republic. These stories of his Indian bride and of his fighting defiance of the white men seem rather more plausible when one forgets that he was but fourteen when he remarked the beauty of the girl and only seventeen when he assumed the responsibilities for which, according to Memorie and Rime, De Bloney's growing inebriety disqualified him.

Viewed from within by a romantic poet, this colony of adventurers and Indians was a noble enterprise for the preservation of an oppressed race; viewed from without it probably seemed more like a nest of horse-thieves. Its importance for Miller was partly in its development of his romantic sympathy with the outlaw. In a paper on "How I Came to Be a Writer Of Books," contributed to Lippincott's in 1886, he illustrates this point, and, at the same time, explains the origin of his pen-name "Joaquin." His parents had called him Cincinnatus Heine (or Hiner); but, during his sojourn on

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 Mt. Shasta, his friends had already begun to employ the more familiar name. According to this account, he had made several trips with Mexican horse and mule drivers down into Arizona and northern Mexico, and, on these expeditions, "these Mexicans were most kind to me." They, on the contrary, were treated by the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of California with a brutality which was "monstrous." "It was this," says Miller, "that had driven Joaquin Murietta, while yet a youth, to become the most terrible and bloody outlaw our land has ever known. A reward of many thousands had been offered for his head, he had been captured, killed, and his head was in spirits and on exhibition in San Francisco, when I took up my pen for the first time and wrote a public letter in defence of the Mexicans." In consequence of this letter, he was banteringly identified by a Sacramento paper with the bandit. His friends continued the banter. The name was revived when he returned to Oregon, and was employed to twit him, when he became an editor. And so he finally accepted it and used it in the title of his first book.

In the chapter of his relations with the Indians, there are manifold obscurities and contradictions. He adhered pretty consistently throughout his life to the assertion that he was in three Indian battles

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 or campaigns, the Battle of Castle Rocks, the "Pit River War," and a later campaign in Oregon. But according to one set of stories he figures as a renegade fighting with the Indians against the whites; while according to the other set of stories he is fighting with the whites against the Indians. The chief sources of the renegade story are Life Amongst the Modocs and Memorie and Rime; but he still calls himself a renegade in the introduction to the Bear Edition. On the other hand, there is in existance among the papers preserved by the Miller family a petition to the government for damages, drawn up by Miller but never presented, in which he represents himself as the victim of Indian depredations; and in his annotations of the poem "Old Gib at Castle Rocks," he establishes by a sworn affidavit that this first battle was against the "Modocs and Other Renegades," and that his wound in the head was received while he was fighting at Judge Gibson's side. In Memorie and Rime, however, he declares that the Battle of Castle Rocks was fought under the leadership of De Bloney, to punish unfriendly Indians for burning his camp. But in the introduction to the Bear Edition, he says nothing of De Bloney; the leader of Miller's party is there represented as Mountain Joe, who in the battle unites forces with Judge Gibson, the alcalde of the district.

The disparities in his various accounts may be explained in three ways. First, Miller did in his

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 poems and prose narratives deliberately adulterate his facts with imaginary elements in the interest of romance, and like his early model Lord Byron, he enjoyed and encouraged identification of himself with all his hard-riding, hard-fighting, and amorous heroes. Secondly, he tells us that as a result of his arrow wound in the head and neck at the Battle of Castle Rocks, "on the 15th day of June, 1855," he lost his memory for months, was "nearly a year" in recovering, and was somewhat feeble minded for some time after. Thirdly, if he ever actually became a renegade and participated in outlaw raids, when he returned to civilization, he indulged in wise "lapses of memory."

With a consciousness, then, that we are treading the uncertain border between fact and fiction, we pull the arrow from Joaquin's neck in the summer of 1855, and commit him to the care of an Indian woman, who treats him as her son. Late in the fall, restored at last to his senses and beginning to recover his strength, he teaches school in a mining camp near Shasta City at night and tries to mine by day—rather strenuous activities for a feeble-minded convalescent! But in the following spring, 1856, he again joins the red men on the mountain. "When the Modocs rose up one night and massacred eighteen men, every man in Pitt River Valley, I alone was spared"—thus runs the introduction to the Bear Edition—"and spared only because I was Los bobo, the fool. Then more bat-

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 tles and two more wounds. My mind was as the mind of a child and my memory is uncertain here." But according to Memorie and Rime, news of the Pitt River massacre came to Joaquin in the spring of 1857, when he was encamped on the spurs of Mt. Shasta, "sixty miles distant;" so that it must have been in a later stage of the "war" that he got his "bullet through the right arm." Had he complicity in the massacre? He raises the question. He says that he knew in advance that it had been planned, and he sympathized with its perpetrators years later. Following it, he made an expedition to Shasta City for ammunition to arm De Bloney's Indians "against the brutal and aggressive white men"; had a horse shot under him by the pursuing whites, stole another horse, was overtaken, threatened with hanging, lodged in Shasta City jail, "and my part in the wild attempt to found an Indian republic was rewarded with a prompt indictment for stealing horses." This, he says, was in 1859. After long confinement, he was delivered from jail by the Indians on the night of the 4th of July, thrown upon a horse, "and such a ride for freedom and fresh air was never seen before." (See Memorie and Rime, pp. 234–235; Life Amongst the Modocs, chap. xxx, and. The Tale of the Tall Alcalde.)

Miller hints, in Memorie and Rime, at one more disastrous attempt to carry out De Bloney's plan for the republic, followed by separation from his leader, and flight to Washington Territory. But

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 in the introduction to the Bear Edition, he interposes at this point in his career, though without dates and vaguely and briefly, his connection with the filibuster William Walker. "I, being a renegade," he says, "descended to San Francisco and set sail for Boston, but stopped at Nicaragua with Walker." In his poem "With Walker in Nicaragua," he represents himself as riding side by side with the filibuster in his campaigns and as treated by him like a son; and he always encouraged the common belief that his poem had a substantial autobiographical core. There is a good deal of evidence for concluding that it had none. Walker sailed from San Francisco in May and landed in Nicaragua on June 16, 1855. On the previous day, Miller was wounded at Castle Rocks, in northern California. In May, 1857, Walker left Nicaragua and was a paroled prisoner in the United States till August, 1860, when he landed in Honduras, where he was executed on the 12th of September in the same year. Miller later associated himself with his hero by publishing the last words of Walker, obtained from the priest who attended the execution; but Miller says in his notes on the poem in the Bear Edition: "I was not with him on this last expedition." Of course the intended implication is that he was with Walker on a previous expedition. Recruits from California sailed down to join the filibuster at frequent intervals, it is true, and Miller may conceivably have visited Nicaragua with one of

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 these parties; but if any credit is to be given to his Indian stories, he was recovering from his Castle Rocks wound from June, 1855, till the spring of 1856, when he joined the red men on the mountains; he spends the winter on the spurs of Mt. Shasta, and in the spring of 1857 he becomes implicated in the Pitt River Valley War, in which he is again seriously wounded; and his connections with this affair are not terminated till 1859. He might then have set out in time to join Walker's fatal expedition in Honduras; but he tells us that he did not. Walker, in his account of. The War in Nicaragua, published in 1860, nowhere mentions the boy whom he is alleged to have fathered. One's final impression is that the poem is fiction, colored by the tales and published narratives of the filibusters and perhaps by Miller's subsequent acquaintance with Central America. And this impression is strengthened by Miller's reply to one who asked him point blank whether he was ever with Walker in Nicaragua: "Was Milton ever in Hell?"

The fiasco of De Bloney's and Joaquin's Mt. Shasta "republic" fell, according to the legend, in the year of John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry, and two years after the ejection of Walker from Nicaragua. In Miller's mind these three curious attempts to escape from the jurisdiction of the United States became closely associated memories

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 of forlorn hopes, with a singular appeal to his imagination. Writing at Harper's Ferry in 1883 (Memorie and Rime, 228 ff.), he gives this account of his movements and sentiments following his alleged connection with Walker and De Bloney: "I made my way to Washington Territory, sold my pistols, and settled down on the banks of the Columbia, near Lewis River, and taught school. And here it was that the story of John Brown, his raid, his fight, his capture, and his execution, all came to me. Do you wonder that my heart went out to him and remained with him? I, too, had been in jail. Death and disgrace were on my track, and might find me any day hiding there under the trees in the hearts of the happy children. And so, sympathizing, I told these children over and over again the story of old John Brown there."

From 1860 to 1870, Miller was chiefly an Oregonian, though he made many excursions from his base. We shall have to notice one more interesting inconsistency which casts a suspicion over his account of his life with the Indians. In the introduction to the Bear Edition, he says in his baffling summary fashion, without dates, that on his return from being "with Walker," he "went home, went to college some, taught school some, studied law at home some." Now, in a note to the Bear Edition (vol. ii, p. 185), he speaks of teaching school in 1858 below Fort Vancouver, "during vacation at Columbia College, the forerunner of the Oregon

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 University"; and, in another note (vol. i, p. 170), he says that he wrote "the valedictory class poem" for Columbia College in 1859. It thus appears that his attendance at "Columbia College" falls in the period when, according to his other stories, he was engaged in his last desperate efforts to establish De Bloney's "Mt. Shasta republic"; and that his valedictory poem was apparently delivered in the year in which he fled from Californian justice to hide in Washington Territory.

If one thinks of Miller as having taken a regular college course ending in 1859, then one must be prepared to dismiss most of the Mt. Shasta stories as mythical; and doubtless there is a large element of fiction in them. They are not, however, quite so inconsistent with the "college" course as at first sight they appear. Eugene City, in which the "college" was located, was not settled till 1854; and the institution, with its "pleasant campus," in which the poem was perhaps delivered five years later, was nothing more than a small-town high school or seminary. And Miller, returning from California in 1858, or even as late as 1859, might, after a very brief instruction, have appeared as class poet in 1859. It is, moreover, unfortunately necessary to regard the statements about his own life made towards the close of his literary career with almost as much skepticism as those which he made near its outset—and for an interesting reason. In his last period, as the seer on The Hights, Miller desired

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 to be regarded as an authoritative man of letters; consequently he minimized his frontier upbringing and magnified his education and general culture. Furthermore, he ultimately desired to be regarded as devoutly American and as intensely pacifistic; consequently he touched very lightly in later years the period when he was a secessionist, he skilfully hinted here and there that the stories of his outlawry were mythical, and he worked over his poems, making great excisions and adding new passages, with the purpose of harmonizing them with his declaration that he would rather starve than be celebrated as the poetic glorifier of war. This was obviously a difficult task in the case of the bloody and imperialistic career of Walker.

In the summer of 1861 Miller began other interesting adventures which are better attested. At this time he was riding Mossman and Miller's pony express, carrying letters and gold dust between Walla

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 Walla, Washington, and the newly opened mines at Millersburg, in Idaho. Attracted by certain contributions of "Minnie Myrtle" appearing in the newspapers of his pack, he wrote to her and had replies. His mining ventures yielded him enough to enable him to build "a beautiful new home" for his parents, and also to buy a newspaper. In 1863 he began to edit The Democratic Register in Eugene, Oregon, and he avowed southern sympathies which aroused the community. Though he had been brought up an ardent abolitionist and his elder brother John had entered the Northern army, he himself had imbibed, in his "college," which was tainted with disloyalty, or from the friends of Walker, who was a pro-slavery man, or elsewhere—he had imbibed principles and sentiments obnoxious to the aroused Unionist spirit of Oregon. As he explained it in Memorie and Rime, "when the war came, and the armies went down desolating the South, then with that fatality that has always followed me for getting on the wrong side, siding with the weak, I forgot my pity for the one in my larger pity for the other."

His entrance into journalism brought him again to the attention of his unknown correspondent, "Minnie Myrtle," who was then living in a mining and lumber camp at Port Orford by the sea, not far from the southern boundary of Oregon. Twenty years later, when this lady died in New York, in May, 1883, Miller told in his own fashion the story

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 of his brief unhappy relations with her. Since they made a turning point in his career and introduced into his poetry additional "Byronic" notes, let us have an abridgement of his own version of the affair as set forth in Memorie and Rime:

"Procuring a horse for her"—for she, too, was an excellent and daring rider—"we set out at once to return to my post, far away over the mountains." After a week's ride, the bridal couple reached their intended home in Eugene, "but only to find that my paper had been suppressed by the Government, and we resolved to seek our fortunes in San Francisco.

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 But we found neither fortune nor friends in that great city." In 1863 Mrs. Fremont was there, and Charles Warren Stoddard, and Prentice Mulford, and in a Coolbrith. Bret Harte was writing for The Golden Era. The nucleus was already formed of the literary group which Mark Twain joined in 1864, and which launched The Californian and The Overland Monthly. Whether at this time Miller made any attempt to break into the "western school" does not appear. If he did so, we can understand his failure. He was still a very immature writer, though Stoddard records that he did contribute to. The Golden Era, "from the backwood depths of his youthful obscurity." But coming as he did in the midst of the Civil War to the outskirts of a group animated by Bret Harte, then engaged in writing strongly patriotic verse and prose, the editor of a paper which had just been suppressed for disloyalty could hardly have expected a very cordial reception.

One is tempted to conjecture that Miller's failure to establish a literary or journalistic connection in the city may perhaps have dashed a little the spirits of his bride. At any rate, he says that even while they were living in San Francisco, she had presentiments of "wreck and storm and separation for us." If thwarted aspiration for more literary and social life than she had enjoyed in the lumber camp had stimulated these presentiments, they must have been strengthened when Joaquin bought a band of cattle

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 and journeyed with his wife and baby to a new mining camp at Canyon City, in eastern Oregon. As for him, it was the life to which he had always been accustomed, and he threw himself into the task of establishing himself with unwonted application of his restless energy. He practised law among the miners, he planted the first orchard in the land, he led in his third Indian campaign; he was rewarded in 1866 by election, for a four-year term, as judge of the Grant County court, and finally, he had begun to occupy himself seriously with poetry. In 1868 he published a pamphlet of Specimens, and in 1869, at Portland, Oregon, his first book: "Joaquin, Et Al., by Cincinnatus H. Miller"—dedicated "To Maud."

Ambition and a multitude of business, as he depicted the matter, made him not the most genial of companions:

Often I never left my office till the gray dawn, after a day of toil and a night of study. My health gave way and I was indeed old and thoughtful. Well, all this, you can see, did not suit the merry-hearted and spoiled child of the mines at all. . . . She became the spoiled child here that she had been at her father's, and naturally grew impatient at my persistent toil and study. But she was good all the time. . . . Let me say here, once for all, that no man or woman can put a finger on any stain in this

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101 No, I don't believe so. I think going into Georgia after D.C. was a "me" decision.

What about did you coordinate this even with the White House at all?

How I'm interpreting your question of coordinating is seeking someone else's permission to do something like that as a collaborative effort, and the answer is I made the decision that we would protest Georgia. I formerly lived there, I know the governor, and I wanted a special session.

I guess let me go back a little bit. That's a great way to get to this.

Who have you talked to that works in the White House in December or January? Who do you know in the White House?

Mr. Kamenar. Is that a question who does he know or who does he talk to?

 * BY :

Actually, who have you talked to in the White House in December or January?

That's pertinent to the Capitol attack?

Just in general.

I would really like to stick to the pertinency of the Capitol attack and January 6th and not go through my personal life or social dealings.

So the reason why I'm asking is because throughout the text messages that you produced to us there's the term "White House is telling me" or "White House this." I'm trying to figure out who in the White House is telling you anything.

I described early in the—in this testimony—and then I'm happy to go through each one of those text messages one by one and see if I recall something or try to recontextualize it contemporaneously.

But in politics, someone can either indirectly tell you something or you'll indirectly


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 woman's whole record of life, so far as truth and purity go. But she was not happy here. Impatient of the dull monotony of the exhausted mining camp,. . . she took her two children and returned to her mother, while I sold the little home,. . . promising to follow her, yet full of ambition now to be elected to a place on the Supreme Bench of the State. . . . She had been absent from me quite a year, when. . . I went to Portland, seeking the nomination for the place I desired. But the poor impatient lady, impulsive as always, and angry that I had kept so long away, had forwarded papers from her home, hundreds of miles remote, to a lawyer here, praying for a divorce. This so put me to shame that I abandoned my plans and resolved to hide my head in Europe.

To "hide" his head was hardly the prime object of Miller's first trip abroad, nor, except by a wide poetic license, can the phrase be used to describe his activities there. His object was more candidly presented in a line of his Byronic "Ultime," the last poem of the little volume, Joaquin, Et Al., published in Portland in 1869—a poem written as if in premonition of death:

As soon as Joaquin, Et Al. was published, what Miller burned for was literary recognition impossible on the Oregon frontier. In March of 1869, he wrote from Portland to Charles Warren Stoddard to solicit his interest in getting the book ade-

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 quately noticed in The Overland Monthly, which had been launched two months before. Stoddard was absent in Hawaii; but in January, 1870, Bret Harte gave Joaquin a humorous but not unfriendly salute in the new magazine: "We find in  ' Joaquin, Et Al. '  the true poetic instinct, with a natural felicity of diction and a dramatic vigour that are good in performance and yet better in promise. Of course, Mr. Miller is not entirely easy in harness, but is given to pawing and curvetting; and at such times his neck is generally clothed with thunder and the glory of his nostrils is terrible."

Following this recognition from the leading literary periodical of the Far West, Miller came down from Oregon to embrace the bards of San Francisco Bay—so romantically addressed by him in Joaquin, Et Al.—came to embrace them and to be embraced by them—"clad," says Stoddard, who had now returned from Hawaii, "in a pair of beaded moccasins, a linen 'duster' that fell nearly to his heels, and a broad-brimmed sombrero." Fresh, breezy, ingenuous, Miller exclaimed at once, "Well, let us go and talk with the poets." Stoddard took him around to call upon Bret Harte, and presented him also to the most lyrical third of their trinity, the local Sappho, In a Coolbrith, who was at once impressive and sympathetic. But on the whole, literary glory at the Golden Gate was paler than his expectations—"he had been somewhat chilled by his reception in the metropolis." Had

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 he really desired to hide his head, he might have accepted Stoddard's invitation to flee away with him to the South Seas. Instead of doing so, Miller accepted a wreath of laurel from in a Coolbrith, to lay on the tomb of Byron, and, in midsummer of 1870, "started for England in search of fame and fortune."

One dwells upon this first return to the old world, because now one sees for the first time adequately manifested the literary sensibility and the imaginative yearning which for years had been secretly growing in the heart of the judge of Grant County, Oregon. Here is an astounding fact: jottings from a diary, preserved in Memorie and Rime, prove that this backwoodsman went abroad, not with the jaunty insolence of Mark Twain's jolly Philistines, but rather in the mood of Henry James's delicately nurtured "passionate pilgrims" of the decade following the Civil War, those sentimental and æsthetically half-starved young Americans who in the middle years of the last century flung themselves with tearful joy on England and Europe as the dear homeland of their dreams. There is a touch, sometimes more than a touch, of the theatrical in his gesture; but there is an unquestionable depth of sincere feeling animating the performance as a whole.

There is even a touch of pathos—the more affecting because he himself, for once, seems hardly aware of it—in the memoranda of his departure

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 from New York. He bought his ticket on August 10, 1870, "second class, ship Europa, Anchor Line, to land at Glasgow; and off to-morrow." While waiting for the sailing, he notes that he has tried in vain to see Horace Greeley and Henry Ward Beecher, but has got some leaves from a tree by the door of Beecher's church "to send to mother." There, in a sentence, was his unconscious epitome of what the higher culture of the American metropolis had to offer in 1870 to a passionate pilgrim, to a romantic poet: the editorials of a great journalist, the sermons of a great preacher—a rebuff from the office of the one, and a leaf from a tree of the other. A note of the voyage, which he seems to have found very dreary, reminds us that the Franco-Prussian War was then in progress: "A lot of Germans going home to fight filled the ship; a hard, rough lot, and they ate like hogs."

Arrived in Scotland, he turns his back on commercial Glasgow, and makes straight for the haunts of Burns. On September 10, he writes: "God bless these hale and honest Scotch down here at peaceful Ayr. . . . One man showed me more than a hundred books, all by Ayrshire poets, and some of them splendid! I have not dared to tell any one yet that I too hope to publish a book of verse. . . . I go every day from here to the 'Auld Brig' over the Doon, Highland Mary's grave, and Alloway's auld haunted kirk. . . . Poetry is in the air here. I am working like a beaver. . . . September 18: In

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 the sunset to-day, as I walked out for the last time toward the tomb of Highland Mary, I met a whole line of splendid Scotch lassies with sheaves of wheat on their heads and sickles on their arms. Their feet were bare, their legs were bare to the knees. Their great strong arms were shapely as you can conceive; they were tall, and their lifted faces were radiant with health and happiness. I stepped aside in the narrow road to enjoy the scene and let them pass. They were going down the sloping road toward some thatched cottages by the sea, I towards the mountains. How beautiful! I uncovered my head as I stepped respectfully aside. But giving the road to women here seems to be unusual. . . ." Having paid his devotion to Burns, his "brother," he goes on into the Scott country, wades the Tweed, and spends a night in Dryburg Abbey.

Thence he proceeds, with ever more reverential mood, to Nottingham, where he lays his western laurel on the tomb of his "master," Byron, and bargains with the caretaker "to keep the wreath there as long as he lives (or I have sovereigns)." "O my poet!" he cries, "worshipped where the world is glorious with the fire and the blood of youth! Yet here in your own home—ah, well!" The parallelism between Byron's fate and his own, on which he broods in Nottingham, stimulates him to fresh poetical efforts. On September 28, the record runs:

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After a glimpse of the war, he began on November 2, 1870, his adventures in London—which he found delightfully different from New York—by walking straight to Westminster Abbey, guided only by the spirit in his feet. Later, he continued his passionate pilgrimage by looking up the haunts of Washington Irving and Bayard Taylor, and he lived for a while in Camberwell, because Browning had lived there. In February, 1871, he was lodged in a garret of the poet Cowley's house, "right back of the Abbey," looking out on Virginia creepers planted by Queen Elizabeth, and listening to the sound of the city's bells. Refreshed from his bath in the stream of poetic tradition and "atmospherically" inspired, Miller made a little book called Pacific Poems, containing "Arazonian" (sic) and

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 his drama "Oregonia," and having printed, at his own expense, a hundred copies, scoured the city seeking a publisher. But the publishers would have none of it. Murray, "son of the great Murray, Byron's friend," received him, indeed, and showed him many pictures of Byron, but rejected the proffered opportunity to become Joaquin's publisher, saying, with definitive uplifted finger: "Aye, now, don't you know poetry won't do? Poetry won't do, don't you know?"

In other quarters he met with better fortune. Knocking at the door of Punch, as a nameless American, he was cordially received by "my first, firmest friend in London," a man in whose arms Artemus Ward had died,—Tom Hood, son of the famous humorist. By March, 1871, he got his Pacific Poems to the reviews and into a kind of private circulation without a publisher. Almost at once both book and author began to catch the fancy of the London literary tasters, who are always hospitably inclined to real curiosities from overseas, and welcome a degree of crudity in a transatlantic writer as evidence that he is genuinely American. By the end of the month, "Arazonian" was attributed by the Saint James Gazette to Robert Browning; and, notes the diary, "Walter Thornbury, Dickens' dear friend, and a better poet than I can hope to be, has hunted me up, and says big things of the 'Pacific Poems' in the London Graphic." There are, moreover, "two splendid enthusiasts

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 from Dublin University." And, finally, Tom Hood has introduced him to the society poet of the city, who, in turn, has given him letters "to almost everybody"; and so he is socially launched. With this encouragement and backing, he attacks the publishers again, this time successfully. By April, 1871, Longmans has brought out his Songs of the Sierras, and Miller's "boy ambition" is accomplished.

At one stride he had stepped from backwoods obscurity into the full noontide of glory; and it is not strange that the remembrance of his English reception dazzled him for the rest of his life. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this acclaim was instantaneous, enthusiastic, and unanimous—"over-generous," he called it, years later, when he published in the Bear Edition some thirty pages of appreciations from the English press, including The Spectator, The Athenæum, The Saturday Review, The Pall Mall Gazette, The Illustrated London News, The Academy, The Evening Standard, The Westminster Review, The Dark Blue, The London Sunday Times, Chamber's Journal, Frazer's Magazine, The Evening Post, The Globe, The Morning Post, and others. These are largely concerned with his first volume, Songs of the Sierras. The reviewers, in general, touch lightly upon his obvious inequalities, blemishes, slips in grammar, and faults in metre; some of them apologize slightly for his frontier culture; more recognize it boldly as the source of his power, and proceed to speak in glow-

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 ing terms of his freshness of theme and treatment, of his tropical color, his myth-making power, his fluent, rapid, and melodious verse, and "the supreme independence, the spontaneity, the all-pervading passion, the unresting energy, and the prodigal wealth of imagery which stamp the poetry before us."

They did not hesitate, this chorus of reviewers, to tell him that his poetry was the most important that had ever come out of America. Nor did they stop with this equivocal praise. The Athenæum found him like Browning in his humor and in the novelty of his metaphors. The Saturday Review dwelt on his Byronic qualities, and remarked in him "a ring of genuineness which is absent from Byron." The Westminster Review thought that he reminded one of Whitman, with the coarseness left out. And The Academy gravely declared that "there is an impassable gap between the alien couleur locale of even so great a poet as Victor Hugo in such a work as Les Orientales, and the native recipiency of one like our California author, whose very blood and bones are related to the things he describes, and from whom a perception and a knowledge so extremely unlike our own are no more separable than his eye, and his brain."

In the wake of the journalistic ovation, social invitations came in upon the poet faster than he could accept or answer them. Among those which he had pushed aside were three letters signed

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 "Dublin." His Irish friends discovered these and explained that they were from the Archbishop (Trench). "At 'Dublin's' breakfast," says Miller, "I met Robert Browning, Dean Stanley, Lady Augusta, a lot more ladies, and a duke or two, and after breakfast 'Dublin' read to me—with his five beautiful daughters grouped about—from Browning, Arnold, Rossetti, and others, till the day was far spent." The other great feast of the season was an all-night dinner with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, at which "the literary brain" of London was present. As he recalled the event, with an intoxication of delight, later in the summer: "These giants of thought, champions of the beautiful earth, passed the secrets of all time and all lands before me like a mighty panorama. . . . If I could remember and write down truly and exactly what these men said, I would have the best and the greatest book that was ever written."

What he recorded of the conversation is not overpoweringly impressive; but from this rather bewildering contact with the pre-Raphælite group Miller departed with a vivid conviction that he, too, was above all else a lover of the beautiful, and he carried away a strong impression, which markedly affected his next volume of poems, that beauty is resident in "alliteration and soft sounds." Perhaps, however, the most noteworthy utterance which he preserved was his own reply to a question of Rossetti's:

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There was more than a drop of bitterness mingled in the joy of his English welcome. With the cup raised to his lips, he wrote in his diary, "I was not permitted to drink." In the midsummer of this most triumphal year, he received news that his sister had died. He returned to the United States, only in time to attend the death-bed of his elder brother in Pennsylvania. Re-visiting his parents in Oregon, he found his mother in broken health and failing mind. Furthermore, the American reception of his poems lacked the warmth of the English cordiality. The traditional superciliousness of the East towards the West and a resentful unwillingness to have this uncouth frontiersman accepted abroad as a leading or even a significant representative of American letters—these not altogether unfamiliar notes are strident in a review in the New York Nation in 1871: "It is the 'sombreros' and 'serapes' and 'gulches,' we suppose, and the other Californian and Arizonian properties, which have caused our English friends to find in Mr. Miller a truly American poet. He is Mr. William Rossetti's latest discovery. We trust, however, that we have no monopoly of ignorance and presumption and taste for Byronism. In other climes, also, there have been Firmilians, and men need not be born in California

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102 hear chatter or they'll tweet about something and put out a press release and someone won't be in the know and you're telling them that they're in the know.

What I can say is that I'm just going to volunteer this information, even though, again, I don't think it has anything to do with the Capitol attack.

I spoke with White House adviser Peter Navarro on January 5th at our rally, and to my recollection that's my first time ever talking to him.

Okay.

And, you know, he was at the rally. So I think we spoke for 2 minutes, and I introduced him.

You know, I know a lot of people in politics. Some people, like, you know, take leave from the administration or they're in the administration but not the White House. But what I will say is that the people—you know, I didn't need to talk about the Ellipse and Lot 8.

The person that I talked to was Caroline Wren, and to make a duplicative effort to me would seem a waste of resources or my time. I talk to hundreds of people probably a day. I mean, I was like the busiest person in America. I know some people don't like that, but a lot of other people love it.

And another gentleman I talked to at the White House was—and we did talk about election integrity, but I don't recall talking about the 6th—Garrett Ziegler, who worked for Mr. Navarro. And I know we talked about election integrity. I don't recall talking to him about the 6th or the 5th. And I don't see how he would be in any authority to kind of do anything like that.

Okay. Okay. When you were doing this rally at the Capitol, did you coordinate it with any Members of Congress?

"We," like this proverbial—


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 to have the will in excess of the understanding and the understanding ill-informed. There are people of all nationalities whom a pinch more brains and a trifle more of difidence would not hurt."

The chilliness of American literary criticism was not all, nor perhaps the worst, that Miller had to face on his return to the United States. During his absence in Europe, he had been accused at home, and not without a basis in fact, of deserting his wife. His celebrity as author of Songs of the Sierras gave newspaper value to the story. And in the fall of 1871, "Minnie Myrtle" made the entire subject a topic for editorial comment, both at home and abroad, by corroborating the story and then proceeding, in the spirit of magnanimity or of irony or of publicity, to justify the poet. Early in 1872, The Saturday Review summarized Mrs. Miller's communication to the American press, and discussed it at length, with elaborate comparison of the classical case of Lord Byron. From this discussion the following extract will suffice for our purposes:

The public, she holds [by her own act belying the contention] has nothing to do with Mr. Miller except as a poet, and has no right to sit in judgment on his conduct as a husband or father; and in the next place, poets are different from other people, and their lives must be judged, if at all, by a different standard. Mr. Miller, we are informed, "felt that he was gifted, and his mind being of a fine, poetic structure, and his brain very delicately organ-

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 ized, the coarse and practical duties of providing for a family, and the annoyance of children, conflicted with his dreams and literary whims." It had been for years his ambition to go to Europe and become famous. Time and money were of course necessary to his project, and when he wrote his wife that he should be absent for five or six years, and that she must not expect to hear from him often, she thought it would be better to release him at once from domestic obligations. . . . Mrs. Miller assures us that she fully sympathized with her husband's projects, and that she believes them to be justified by their practical results. "Mr. Miller," she says, "felt that he had gifts of the mind, and if his system of economy was rigid and hard to endure, it was at least a success; and if he needed all his money to carry out his plans, I am satisfied that he thus used it. . . . As we are both mortals, it would be affectation in me were I to profess to take upon myself all the blame, but I ask to bear my full share. . . . Good sometimes comes of evil. . . . Our separation and sorrows produced the poems of 'Myrrh' and 'Even So.

It was at about this point in his career that Miller proved the adage about a prophet in his own country.

And now perhaps he did seriously consider hiding his head for a time in Europe—hiding it in the Byronic fashion. From early in 1872 till 1875 "Childe" Miller wandered extensively, returning to Europe with a wide detour by way of South America and the Near East. From scattered references one gathers that he made acquaintance with the

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 Emperor of Brazil, that he went down the Danube and up the Nile, saw Athens and Constantinople, visited Palestine, and was "in and about the tomb of buried empires and forgotten kings." These wanderings, impossible to trace in detail, were interrupted and punctuated by considerable periods of steady literary work, by visits to England, by a sojourn in Italy, and by publications—all of which can be dated with tolerable accuracy.

Beside the new edition of Songs of the Sierras, he published in 1873 the first reflection of these travels in Songs of the Sun-Lands. Of this, a reviewer in the Athenæum said: "Mr. Miller's muse in this, its second flight, has taken the same direction as in its first essay, but, upon the whole, we think, with a stronger wing." In the prelude to the first long poem in the book, Miller cries with fine bravado that "the passionate sun and the resolute sea" have been his masters, "and only these." So far as the prosodical qualities of this collection are concerned, this announcement is amusing, because nowhere else in his work does he show himself so obviously the "sedulous ape" of his English contemporaries. The volume is dedicated to the Rossettis; in "Isles of the Amazons" he is affected by the stanza of "In Memoriam" and he also echoes Mrs. Browning; in "Sleep That Was Not Sleep" he attempts the Browningesque dramatic mono-

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 logue; remembering the Rossetti dinner of 1871, he works on the theory that "a poem must be a picture," and he is everywhere studious of "alliteration and soft sounds"; finally in the Palestinian sequence called "Olive Leaves," the influence of Swinburne has quite transformed and disguised the sound of his voice:

Despite all this mimicry in the manner, the stuff in the Songs of the Sun-Lands is, in great measure, Miller's own. In "Isles of the Amazons" he conceives himself as a scout of the imagination, a Kit Carson of poetry, who has carried his banner from Oregon and the Sierras to plant it in South American islands by a mighty unsung river. His hero, a singing warrior fleeing from strife to seek a Utopian peace and felicity, is once more a kind of self-projection. "From Sea to Sea" is a poetical reminiscence of a transcontinental journey by the new Pacific Railway. By the Sundown Seas, which

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 he later cut up into its constituent pictures, sings the glories of Oregon and the emigrants. In "Olive Leaves," his garland from Palestine, he begins a peculiarly American reappropriation of Christianity and an assimilation of it to his growing humanitarian sentiment. And "Fallen Leaves" are for the most part memories of the West. So that if he does not exhibit any very daring unconventionalities in form, he does employ his forms with a good deal of flexibility in imaginatively molding the raw stuff of American experience.

In 1873, also, Miller published in France and England the most original and the most poetical of all his books in prose, and, on the whole, perhaps the most interesting book that he ever produced, Life Among the Modocs, which circulated in translations, later editions, and abridgments, pirated or otherwise, under various titles—as Unwritten History, Scenes de la Vie des Mineurs et des Indiens de California, Paquita, My Own Story, and My Life Among the Indians. In 1872 and 1873 the Modoc Indians were attracting the attention of the public by their stubborn resistance to the government's attempt to move them from their old lands to a new reservation. In the course of this resistance their killing of two peace commissioners naturally excited popular indignation. But in Miller, instinctively sympathetic with the under dog, the last hopeless stand of this warlike tribe, which he had known in his boyhood, appealed strongly to the humani-

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 tarian sentiment, stirred up old memories, and aroused the imagination. He had, as we have seen, in at least one of his "campaigns," fought against them; but now, as a poet and Utopian, he is all on their side, he embraces their cause, he speaks from their point of view, he makes himself one of them.

In the introduction to the Bear Edition, he gives this brief account of the origin of the book: "Haying met the Prince, on a visit from Nicaragua at the time, he helped me to recall our life among the Modocs, adding such romance of his own as he chose." Elsewhere he acknowledges the collaboration of Prentice Mulford. How much is due to the influence of these collaborators one cannot say, but there is a continuity of narrative and dramatic and idyllic interest in the tale unequalled in Miller's other prose fiction. The authors enter with genuine enthusiasm into the exhibition of the white man's inhumanity, the virtues of the "noble savage," the chivalry of the Prince, the heroic fidelity of Paquita, the yellow-haired poetic renegade and his dusky bride, and the romantic and melancholy charm of life on the forested slopes of Mt. Shasta. There is a wavering thread of autobiographical fact running through the romance, but the romance is here far more significant than the thread of fact; all that Miller, as a poetic dreamer, longed to have been, all that he could not be, inextricably fused with what he was, is here projected, beautifully, by his

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 imagination. He so long encouraged the acceptance of the book as "history" that perhaps in his later years he actually lost the ability, never notable in him, to distinguish what he had done from what he had dreamed. In 1874 this book, with the title Unwritten History: Life Amongst the Modocs, was brought out in a subscription edition by the American Publishing Company, and in the advertising pages of this edition is third in a list beginning with Mark Twain's. The Gilded Age and Josh Billings's Everybody's Friend. This will suggest to those who remember the American Publishing Company the sort and size of the audience that Miller was addressing in the middle's eventies.

In Memorie and Rime, Miller says that he returned to London in November, 1874, from his long wanderings in Europe. Apparently, however, he had returned to England in the preceding year, perhaps partly to enjoy the réclame of his two new books. In 1873, at any rate, he made his acquaintance with that poet and patron of the arts and great organizer of literary breakfasts, Lord Houghton. In Reid's Life of Lord Houghton little record remains of this friendship, except a letter of August 5, 1873, addressed to Gladstone, in which Miller is commended as "most interesting as poet and man; I have known and asked nothing as to his private life." Augustus Hare (The Story of My Life, vol. iv) makes a supercilious reference to the poet's appearance at one of these breakfasts: "Joaquin

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