"Now, what do you call poetry?" and he turned his great Italian eyes tenderly to where I sat at his side.
"To me a poem must be a picture," I answered.
There was more than a drop of bitterness mingled in the joy of his English welcome. With the cup raised to his lips, he wrote in his diary, "I was not permitted to drink." In the midsummer of this most triumphal year, he received news that his sister had died. He returned to the United States, only in time to attend the death-bed of his elder brother in Pennsylvania. Re-visiting his parents in Oregon, he found his mother in broken health and failing mind. Furthermore, the American reception of his poems lacked the warmth of the English cordiality. The traditional superciliousness of the East towards the West and a resentful unwillingness to have this uncouth frontiersman accepted abroad as a leading or even a significant representative of American letters—these not altogether unfamiliar notes are strident in a review in the New York Nation in 1871: "It is the 'sombreros' and 'serapes' and 'gulches,' we suppose, and the other Californian and Arizonian properties, which have caused our English friends to find in Mr. Miller a truly American poet. He is Mr. William Rossetti's latest discovery. We trust, however, that we have no monopoly of ignorance and presumption and taste for Byronism. In other climes, also, there have been Firmilians, and men need not be born in California
