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
