Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/283

Rh The above is clipped from the Columns of our man's rights contemporary, the Bedrock Democrat. While we are proud of the genius of our countryman, and are rejoiced at his poetical success, we are not disposed to brook Byron-like instability, the Milton-like moroseness or the Dickens-like pomposity of any literary aspirant. Mrs. Miller has herself a poetical genius of the highest order. It was her inspiration that first evoked the slumbering talents of her inconstant lord. She toiled under pain, inconvenience and poverty to promote the best interests of this American Jean Ingelow—did brother Abbott know Jean was a woman?—and only when she found herself and children deserted, and her husband pursuing another woman who thought his advances capital fun, did she, the outraged wife, and deserted mother, give up her claim of wifehood.

Mrs. "Joaquin" Miller, and another lady quite as deservedly high in poetical fame as this rider of the fabled Pegassus, are at present engaged in rearing the deserted children of this new literary lion. When this task of love and humanity is accomplished the world will yet hear from them sweeter poetical strains than have been wafted to us from across the Atlantic by the truant husband and father, whom the Bedrock Democrat may well liken in his erratic course to some of the dark phases in the lives of illustrious Byron and immortal Boz.

Minnie Myrtle Miller has been described as she appeared at the time she was giving "her bitter lecture about him" in Oregon and California, in 1871 and 1872:

"She was a woman of an odd sort of beauty—on the fantastic order—with a splendid head of curly black hair, dark eyes, and of rather imperious carriage. . . . Very thoughtful looking, alive to her finger tips, and oddly dressed. It was a warm day and she had on a white muslin dress with a black fur tippet about her throat."

The poet's absence in Europe and his swift attain-