Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/368

 greatly concerned as to what his honorable course should be. He wrote to his sister. It was a very serious letter but he knew his Hood River and it had this ending:

"Write me a letter that will guide me in my perplexities, and keep my perplexities to yourself for goodness sake."

After the publication of his book and the encouragement of its success, he wrote feverishly, adding this labor to his studies and his preaching. His tubercular constitution could not stand so much and his second year in school was one of increasing illness. He returned to Hood River in March, 1891, and died in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland on June 3, lacking six months of being thirty years old.

He left the manuscripts of a few poems that are less important than his prose, though "What the Zither Said" has some lyrical value and some genuine pathos. It was first published in the Pacific, a religious paper, in 1887, when grief was fresh in his heart. It begins with "I learned a lesson, Genevieve, tonight from what the zither said," and later has the two lines "I see a grave beneath the pine, the river floating by." This and two other poems and two prose sketches were collected into a little volume called Memaloose, privately printed in Portland in 1934, in a limited hand-set edition, by Myron Ricketts and Thomas Binford, two students in the school of journalism of the University of Oregon.

Genevieve: A Tale of Oregon was published by the Metropolitan Press in Portland in 1932. Thus of his three books, two were published more than 40 years after his death.