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 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:

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