IV
This leads us to the second phase of Miller's personality: he was a philosopher, a ponderer upon the deeper things of the spirit. He had inherited with his Scotch blood a religious strain, and a large section of his poetry deals with regions far indeed from his Sierras. He has written much upon the common fundamentals of humanity: religion, love, honor, courage, truth, and the like. In his "Vale! America," written in Italy during his second European sojourn, he could say,
I have lived from within and not from without,
And again
Could I but return to my woods once more,
And dwell in their depths as I have dwelt,
Kneel in their mosses as I have knelt,
Sit where the cool white rivers run,
Away from the world and half hid from the sun,
Hear winds in the wood of my storm-torn shore,
To tread where only the red man trod,
To say no word, but listen to God!
Glad to the heart with listening—
It seems to me that I then could sing,
And sing as never sung man before.
There was within him indeed something of the recluse and the hermit. No one of the period, not even Muir or Burroughs, approached Nature with more of worship. He would live with her and make her central in every point of his life. In his later years he built him a cabin on the heights above San Francisco Bay with a tremendous outlook of sea and mountain and sky, and lived there the rest of his life.
I know a grassy slope above the sea,
The utmost limit of the westmost land.
In savage, gnarl'd, and antique majesty
The great trees belt about the place, and stand
In guard, with mailed limb and lifted hand,
Against the cold approaching civic pride.
The foamy brooklets seaward leap; the bland
Still air is fresh with touch of wood and tide,
And peace, eternal peace, possesses, wild and wide.
He became more and more solitary, more and more of a mystic as the years went on. Even from the first, as Rossetti pointed out, there is an almost oriental pantheism in him. It came perhaps from his Indian training. "Some curious specimens," Rossetti observed, "might be culled of the fervid interfusion of external nature and the human soul in his descriptive passages. The great factors of the natural world—the sea, the mountains, the sun, moon, and stars—become personalities, animated with an intense life and dominant possession."
But Miller was by no means a satyr, as many have pictured him, delighting in wildness for the mere sake of wildness. He overflowed with humanity. No man was ever more sensitive or more genuinely sympathetic. In his later years he sat above the tumult a prophet and seer, and commented and advised and warned. Great areas of his poetry have nothing to do with the West, nothing at all with the manner and the material that are so naturally associated with his name. For decades his voice was heard wherever there was oppression or national wrong. He wrote sonorous lyrics for the Indians, the Boers, the Russian Jews; he wrote the ringing "Cuba Libre" which was read by the Baroness de Bazus in the leading American cities before the Spanish war; he championed the cause of woman; and everywhere he took the side of the weaker against the strong. In this he resembles Mark Twain, that other prophet of the era. The freedom of the new West was in both of them, the true American "hatred of tyranny intense." He was won always by gentleness and beauty: he wrote a Life of Christ, he wrote The City Beautiful, and Songs of the Soul.
But almost all that he wrote in this pet field of his endeavor perished with its day. Of it all there is no single poem that may be called distinctive. He moralizes, he preaches, he champions the weak, but he says nothing new, nothing compelling. He is not a singer of the soul: he is the maker of resounding addresses to the peaks and the plains and the sea; the poet of the westward march of a people; the poet of elemental men in elemental surroundings—pioneers amid the vastness of the uttermost West.