logue; remembering the Rossetti dinner of 1871, he works on the theory that "a poem must be a picture," and he is everywhere studious of "alliteration and soft sounds"; finally in the Palestinian sequence called "Olive Leaves," the influence of Swinburne has quite transformed and disguised the sound of his voice:
Frankincense and sacredest oil
In ivory, chased with devices
Cut quaint and in serpentine coil;
Heads bared, and held down to the bosom;
Brows massive with wisdom and bronzed;
Beards white as the white may in blossom,
And borne to the breast and beyond,—
Came the Wise of the East, bending lowly
On staffs, with their garments girt round
With girdles of hair, to the Holy
Child Christ, in their sandals.
Despite all this mimicry in the manner, the stuff in the Songs of the Sun-Lands is, in great measure, Miller's own. In "Isles of the Amazons" he conceives himself as a scout of the imagination, a Kit Carson of poetry, who has carried his banner from Oregon and the Sierras to plant it in South American islands by a mighty unsung river. His hero, a singing warrior fleeing from strife to seek a Utopian peace and felicity, is once more a kind of self-projection. "From Sea to Sea" is a poetical reminiscence of a transcontinental journey by the new Pacific Railway. By the Sundown Seas, which
