Page:The Pacific Monthly volume 4.djvu/358

 uriantly in verse that celebrated local events and scenes. His “Song of the Sword” has been ranked as one of the five great battle-pieces of the world. There is nothing amateur, nothing crude in Simpson’s work; he has the form and completeness of a classic with the subject matter of a new land. One day Oregon may build a shrine to the memory of him who bore

Another Oregon genius from “the plains across” is Ella Higginson. She, too, came as an infant, from a log-cabin in Kansas. Her first book, “The Flower that Grew in the Sand,” was published in Seattle in 1896. In the same year the Macmillan Company, of New York, secured the copyright and brought out new editions under the title, “From the Land of the Snow Pearls.” In 1897 the same firm published her second book, “A Forest Orchid, and Other Tales.” In 1898 her first volume of poems, “When the Birds Go North Again,” appeared. Her story, “The Takin’ In of Old Mis’ Lane,” won the $500 prize from McClure, and is the one of which the New Orleans Picayune said, “We suggest that it be made the model of a perfect