Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/74

56 Later Poets as a sort of hermit on the heights above Oakland, where he built the cairn upon which his ashes rest. Primarily he was a man of action in an active society. If there was something of the theatrical about him, it became so habitual, as C. W. Stoddard testifies, as to be natural. Compared with Harte at least, who exploited the West, he is the unfeigned expression of the West. If he had not much culture, he fortunately did not pretend to have, but relied upon the force within him. His "rough, broken gallop," as a London reviewer described his style, has a charm that draws the reader "on and on, " disre- garding the defects of his quality — his lack of proportion, his crudity in music and in taste. In the end, his defects may be fatal, so far as purely literary values are concerned, but he had the good fortune to record the Western scene in poetry as no one else has done, an achievement that will not soon be for- gotten. He was so Western as almost to be a caricattu-e of his section, as Emily Dickinson is of New England. Edward Rowland Sill ( 1841-87) , another of the more promi- nent Far Western poets, bom in the same year with Joaquin Miller, wrote quite apart from the literary movements of both West and East, though his artistic ideals had some resemblance to those of the New York school and his temperament was that of a New Englander. Twenty-two years of his life belong to California, but he was bom in Connecticut and died in Ohio. He was descended from old New England families, whose heads were mainly ministers on his mother's side and physicians on his father's side. At Yale College he was a "dreamy, impetuous, sensitive, thoughtful youth" who read widely aside from the curriculum, who impressed his comrades with his attractive personality, pure character, and literary talent, and who con- fronted the world in a spirit of independent inquiry. ' ' He must translate human experience into his own thought and language. ' ' He published Dream-Doomed, Music, and other poems in the college literary magazine, and was the class poet of 1861; his Commencement Poem, included in his collected verse, was long regarded at Yale as the best class poem that had been delivered there. Graduating at twenty, in poor health, he made the trip to California by way of Cape Horn. For half a dozen years he engaged in miscellaneous occupations, on a ranch, in a post- ofifice, eventually becoming much attached to this alien land.