BY THE PACIFIC OCEAN
by Joaquin Miller
Here room and kingly silence keep
Companionship in state austere;
The dignity of death is here,
The large, lone vastness of the deep;
Here toil has pitched his camp to rest:
The west is banked against the west.
Above yon gleaming skies of gold
One lone imperial peak is seen;
While gathered at his feet in green
Ten thousand foresters are told:
And all so still! so still the air
That duty drops the web of care.
Beneath the sunset’s golden sheaves
The awful deep walks with the deep,
Where silent sea doves slip and sweep,
And commerce keeps her loom and weaves
The dead red men refuse to rest;
Their ghosts illume my lurid West.
JOAQUIN MILLER, poet of the Sierras, was, in the words of Lillie Langtry, "a child of nature and perhaps the most picturesque personality of the literary world. It was at Lord Houghton's house in Arlington Street, London, that I happened to meet the famous Californian. After dinner there was the usual reception, and presently [Lord Houghton] led up to me a very tall, lean man, with a pale intellectual face, yellow hair so long that it lay in curls about his shoulders, a closely cropped beard, and a dreamy expression in his light eyes. I don't remember what he wore, except that it was unconventional. He was so new and strange, that his apparel, whatever it was, seemed to complete the picture . . . "
Miller's poems were admired by Rosetti, Swinburne, and Tennyson and the rumors around London were: that he had run away from school to mine for gold; was adopted by Indians; and, imprisoned on trumped-up charges, escaped from jail aided by an Indian girl, swam a river with her to freedom, and married her. All this before he was twenty.