Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/317

Rh book, reading the manuscript to my father and mother for comment.

During the visits mentioned, Joaquin Miller proposed to Belle W. Cooke that they publish their poems together in one volume, but she declined. If she had done so, her name would have been known every where today. At that time, however, fame was ahead as uncertainly for him as for her. The two little volumes printed for him in Portland by George H. Himes in 1868 and 1869, neither of them so beautiful as the volume printed for her in Salem by E. M. Waite in 1871, show now in their relative values the difference between hope and promise, frustrated by whatever duty, and the goal achieved, in forgetfulness of whatever responsibility. One of those two books of his has sold for as much as $450, while hers can still be picked up, scarce as it is, for $2. What did Minnie Myrtle Miller think of his proposal to this Salem poet for a joint volume? Did she identify her husband's side of it as a means of saving money on the printer or a way of getting his own things read by a popular woman's friends, or did she sensitively construe it as a recognition of Belle W. Cooke as a better poet than herself? Did she brood over the fact that Joaquin Miller had never suggested collaboration to her?

Mrs. Lee tells of a second volume of poems by her mother, nearly all the manuscript of which was burned in the San Francisco fire and was never re-written:

My mother had the material almost complete for a second collection of poems, the main feature being based on Indian legends given her by Angus McDonald, an old Hudson's