Page:Americans (1922).djvu/244

 Emperor of Brazil, that he went down the Danube and up the Nile, saw Athens and Constantinople, visited Palestine, and was "in and about the tomb of buried empires and forgotten kings." These wanderings, impossible to trace in detail, were interrupted and punctuated by considerable periods of steady literary work, by visits to England, by a sojourn in Italy, and by publications—all of which can be dated with tolerable accuracy.

Beside the new edition of Songs of the Sierras, he published in 1873 the first reflection of these travels in Songs of the Sun-Lands. Of this, a reviewer in the Athenæum said: "Mr. Miller's muse in this, its second flight, has taken the same direction as in its first essay, but, upon the whole, we think, with a stronger wing." In the prelude to the first long poem in the book, Miller cries with fine bravado that "the passionate sun and the resolute sea" have been his masters, "and only these." So far as the prosodical qualities of this collection are concerned, this announcement is amusing, because nowhere else in his work does he show himself so obviously the "sedulous ape" of his English contemporaries. The volume is dedicated to the Rossettis; in "Isles of the Amazons" he is affected by the stanza of "In Memoriam" and he also echoes Mrs. Browning; in "Sleep That Was Not Sleep" he attempts the Browningesque dramatic mono-