JOAQUIN MILLER.

 

            "HEAD of gold, breast and arms of silver," but all the rest ''potter's clay." A half savage chained to a star. His soul took in every glory of nature ; the hills, the forest, the overhanging dome of the sky, the stars above, the boom of the deep-sea surges bringing, in an unknown tongue, messages from far-off lands all these were delights to him. The songs of birds always met a response from him, but an Indian wickiup suited him as well as a palace, and when in the deep night the scream of a complaining cougar came to his ears, he smiled and said low to himself: "We are in accord."

            A little more, and he would have been out and out a naked savage ; a little more the other way and the angels in heaven would have bent their ears toward the earth to listen to his melodies. Of the earth he was exceedingly earthy, but all the time the incandescent lights of his soul were shining through the coarse material and illuminating it.

            His courage, moral and physical, was superb. He could look any danger in the face and smile, and when the foremost men and women of the land knocked at his rude door, he received them with a grace as free from affectation as from apology. While he never felt above the most lowly, he never met a man whom he deemed his superior. He had a native savage pride which an earthquake could not have shaken.

            In his youth he accepted the sensual side of life, but at night from his bed on the ground, he had a wireless telegraphy which brought him messages from the stars. He transcribed some of these and their divinity cannot be questioned. Had his surroundings been more refined and had he learned a little discipline in his youth, who knows what he might not have achieved ?

            He lived his own way asking no odds of anyone, and without fear passed on.