There is a sweep and vastness about him at his best that one finds in no other American poet. No cameo cutting for him, no little panels, no parlor decorations and friezes. His canvas is all out of doors and as broad as the continent itself:
Oh, heart of the world's heart! West! my West!
Look up! look out! There are fields of kine,
There are clover-fields that are red as wine;
And a world of kine in the fields take rest,
And ruminate in the shade of the trees
That are white with blossoms or brown with bees.
There are emerald seas of corn and cane;
There are cotton fields like a foamy main,
To the far-off South where the sun was born.
The wild freedom of the Western air beats and surges in his lines:
Room! room to turn round in, to breathe and be free,
To grow to be giant, to sail as at sea
With the speed of the wind on a steed with his mane
To the wind, without pathway or route or a rein.
Room! room to be free where the white border'd sea
Blows a kiss to a brother as boundless as he;
Where the buffalo come like a cloud on the plain,
Pouring on like the tide of a storm-driven main,
And the lodge of the hunter to friend or to foe
Offers rest; and unquestion'd you come or you go.
My plains of America! Seas of wild lands!
From a land in the seas in a raiment of foam,
That has reached to a stranger the welcome of home,
I turn to you, lean to you, lift you my hands.
Or again this magnificent apostrophe to the Missouri River:
Hoar sire of hot, sweet Cuban seas,
Gray father of the continent,
Fierce fashioner of destinies,
Of states thou hast upreared or rent,
Thou know'st no limit; seas turn back
Bent, broken from the shaggy shore;
But thou, in thy resistless track,
Art lord and master evermore.
Missouri, surge and sing and sweep!
Missouri, master of the deep,
From snow-reared Rockies to the sea
Sweep on, sweep on eternally!
And grandest of all, the poem that has all America in it and the American soul, perhaps the grandest single poem of the period, "Columbus":
Behind him lay the gray Azores,
Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores;
Before him only shoreless seas.
The good mate said: "Now must we pray,
For lo! the very stars are gone,
Brave Adm'r'l speak; what shall I say?"
"Why, say: 'Sail on! sail on! and on!'"
In his enthusiasm for the mountains and the American landscape Miller was thoroughly sincere. Despite all his posturing and his fantastic costumes he was a truly great soul, and he spoke from his heart when he said in 1909: "But pity, pity, that men should so foolishly waste time with either me or mine when I have led them to the mighty heart of majestic Shasta. Why yonder, lone as God and white as the great white throne, there looms against the sapphire upper seas a mountain peak that props the very porch of heaven; and yet they bother with and want to torment a poor mote of dust that sinks in the grasses at their feet."[66]