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-
