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-
