Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/390

 tion to be a literary fame—which receives its perpetuation in the hearts of men. Jesse Applegate, in the misfortunes of his old age, had to herd sheep, but A Day with the Cow-Column keeps gaining ground. Sam. L. Simpson at fifty was only the editor of the little Ilwaco Tribune, but his poem is as freshly assured to successive generations as the river it celebrates. If it is enduring life like theirs that we mean, it can come only through the eager, first-hand response to what he wrote by individuals of today and of the distant years ahead, and never through the fading echoes of a great previous response. Men of other achievements might live on in biography and history long after what served as the basis of their fame has perished; but the literary man is quick or dead with his works.

Seeing what his writings could do and did do every day, he did not perceive that one small book of essays, written in the fullness of his great capacity, in the spirit of literature and not of journalism, might have brought him into warm fraternity with the future much more than all this power he possessed and exercised for 45 years. His standards in many ways were the standards of literature. He had an "unwearying bent toward a thoroughgoing analysis of things" and he acquired a style "whose simplicity, sublimity and cogency are matched only in the highest models." Yet when, "with a desire to preserve for future uses the best and most permanent of Mr. Scott's subject-matter", six volumes of his writings were compiled, mostly from the Oregonian, and published in 1924, 14 years after his death, their impression on the public then and during the eleven years since has shown that some