The heart at thought of Oregon Quickens with old delights: Balm-shaken fragrance of the rain, Blue gentian days And emerald ways And red-rose nights. The music of Willamette's falls. That, lost, still pleads and calls; The song a thrush left on the hill; Thro' fir-arcaded silences The lyric laughter of a rill.
Ella Higginson. Oregon.
It is said that there was scratched on the metal of Joe
Meek's rifle barrel his name and an encompassing address: "Joe Meek, Rocky Mountains." All the territory claimed by the old trapper and sheriff as his post-office does not belong to Ella Higginson, but a large sector of it does. She belongs intimately to a geographical portion of it, 500 miles north and south and 350 miles east and west, with Alaska thrown in for good measure. She is the poet of the Pacific Coast north of the Siskiyous. She claims two states and is claimed by them—Oregon and Washington.
Oregon has never lost its attitude of possessiveness, though she has lived at Bellingham for 47 years, and she has expressed as follows her own warm acknowledgment of still belonging to the state where she spent her girlhood and young womanhood and where she was married and did her first writing:
I love the twin states of the Northwest next to God and
my country; and if either should cease to claim me as one of her writers my heart would be broken. I lived in Oregon—in the exquisite Grand Ronde Valley, in Portland, on a lovely farm on the Willamette and at Oregon City—from infancy until 1888. I believe that my childhood and girlhood in Oregon influenced my work more than anything else. I am deeply indebted to several Oregon people who recognized writing ability in me during my girlhood—most
of all, my idolized sister, who was much older than I, and
who was the joy and solace of my life to the day of her
death. After her, Dr. S. D. Pope, of Oxford College, whose private school I attended—being much younger than most of the others—and who greatly praised my early attempts at writing. Captain H. L. Wells, editor of Portland's old West Shore, was a heaven-sent friend. Without his encouragement, patience and kindness, I could never have struggled on—for those were dark days for young writers.
What caused me to become a writer? Nothing but the consuming desire to write. It is the only thing I ever really wanted to do. I wrote my first poem when I was eight—a lonely little girl on the farm; my brother, who was also
much older than I, laughed himself to tears, and my indulgent father "hoped I wouldn't make myself ridiculous"; but my mother kissed me and my sister took me into her arms. I did not try again until I was fourteen, when I wrote an intense love poem, which was printed. I still have it and when I feel like blushing scarlet—a read it again!
Now, as to Oregon's claiming me as one of her writers: Markham was born in Oregon and left when five years old; yet Oregon claimed him for her poet laureate. (And, by the way, I am poet laureate of Washington.)
Her maiden name was Ella Rhoads. She was born in Kansas and crossed the plains to Oregon as an infant with her parents in a two-seated carriage. That was sometime in the 60's. The exact date of her birth she has never given to the public during 40 years as a
prominent writer. This feminine reticence she has kept always graciously but always successfully, in the face of all sorts of persistent and ingenious inquisition by those who have written hundreds of articles
about her. So to satisfy the chronological needs of biography, they have guessed, sometimes, she observes, under and sometimes over. On the catalogue
cards in public libraries it is sometimes given, but that
is a guess also. "It was," she says, "in the 60's. . . .
The only 'dates' I know anything about are those
wrapped in fondant and the ones I faithfully keep—when I can be persuaded to make them! It is a part
of my religion that if we did not celebrate birthdays,
there would be no old age."
Her early days at La Grande and in the Grand Ronde Valley were described at some length by Dr. J. B. Horner in his Oregon Literature, likewise with some guessing and with a confusion of her childhood
period and her later period as a married woman there.
In his appreciative sketch he romantically emphasized
her horseback riding. "On her swift steed she swept
over the valley and drank in the poetry of the scenes,
the anthem of the winds, and the voice of the thunder
as it broke through the mountain gorge." Recently
she re-read the account in his book, in which he gave
her much praise, and says of these early equestrian
activities:
I have been looking over some old things, including Mr. Horner's second edition of Oregon Literature. I was greatly
amused to find myself riding horseback as a child in the
Grand Ronde Valley. I never rode until 1886, after my
return to the Valley with my husband, where we lived for a
short time before coming to the Sound late in 1888. (Mr.
Horner has it 1882). After learning how to ride, I rode
twice daily while in the Grand Ronde Valley and for many
years after coming to the Sound. Mr. Horner was heavenly
kind to me and I loved him for his kindness, and am so
happy that he finally called upon me the summer before he died. But I had forgotten how he made me ride as a child
and it appealed to my lively sense of humor.
After she left La Grande, still as a small child, her
subsequent places of residence can now be given in
accurate sequence, but not the length of time or the
exact years she spent at each place, because biographical matter regarding her is not explicit on these
points and because of her own nonchalant attitude
towards dates. The order of her later homes was Portland, the farm on the Willamette, Oregon City, Portland again, back to La Grande as a married woman,
and Bellingham in 1888 as her permanent home.
It was early in 1870 that she removed with her
parents to Portland—then a village amongst the
stumps—and lived in a white colonial house with a
portico and green blinds at the northeast corner of
Fourth and Lincoln Streets. All that she remembers
of Portland at that time were the lamplighters, the
house in which she lived, a Scotch broom tree, the
"plaza" where a military band played on Saturdays,
and the old Ladd and Reed houses.
They went from Portland to the farm, which was
located at Risley's Landing, the location of which she
has described:
Risley's Landing was between two and three miles south
of Milwaukie—across the river from Oswego and perhaps
a half-mile south. It was directly opposite what is known—or was a few years ago—as the Morey estate, which was
then known as the "Bullock Place." (I'll never forget the
family's convulsions of mirth when I asked if they kept
cows there, too!). I knew all about bullocks from the family
Bible. There was a tiny island just south of our landing.
My sister used to row me there to gather ferns and orchids. Ella Higginson's Old Home at Oregon City
Ella Higginson's Old Home at Oregon City
Residence of Eva Emery Dye, Oregon City
Residence of Eva Emery Dye, Oregon City
Risley's was supposed to be just eight miles south of Portland. The interurban has a station in our meadows. The house was about a hundred yards from the river, on a gentle
slope, in the midst of a large and lovely orchard. About
twenty years ago I went to Oregon City on a steamer, just
to see the river again. And God blessed me. We passed under at least fifty rainbows—there was a whole riverful of them. It was a triumphal procession of Color. If the Falls
had still been at the end of the journey—but I don't dare
dwell upon that.
She cannot recall how long they lived at Risley's
Landing, but the farm itself, she says, is one of her
clearest remembrances. The farm house had big fireplaces with cranes, flanked with book cupboards that
held a fine library for those times—the works of
Shakespeare, Scott, Irving, Tennyson, Cooper, Longfellow, Whittier and others of the great ones. Amidst
these classics was one less classical but of special
charm, The Prairie Flower, which her sister read to
her at bedtime. There also was a different and more
enticing kind of literature in the hired men's room,
into which, during their absence in the fields, a little girl could steal and find Dundenah, the Leaping Fawn, The White Squaw and other volumes of similar vividness and appeal.
There was no drudgery for her on the farm. She
who later became such a hard worker as a writer,
never had to work as a child. She was much younger
than her sister or her brother and was largely indulged
in happy idleness. She was never assigned any duties
and was never punished. Their house was always filled
with visitors, and, though they were poor, it was a
place of wonderful things to eat. "They fed everyone who needed food, and many who did not." It is because of this gastronomic background that many literary reviewers, mostly men, have mentioned the dinners in her stories.
One of their regular Sunday visitors was an early Oregon poet of promise but of abortive ambition—Eugene L. Thorpe. Later he was a contributor to the Portland papers. "In my opinion," says Mrs. Higginson, "some of his poems were far better than any of Minnie Myrtle's." Later he decided to give up writing poetry and did so, for reasons that he stated one day to Mrs. Higginson's sister, Carrie Blake Morgan, who was also a poet: "Carrie, I'm going to stop writing poetry. A fellow needs to go nearly crazy be fore he can write a poem." Since by that time both Mrs. Higginson and her sister were confirmed addicts, they considered this a great joke on themselves.
Her father was the story teller, with a relish for dramatic presentation, but her mother was the poet, often calling her "to see or hear something beautiful in nature—a falling star, a rainbow, a mourning dove, a new red rose. From her I inherited a passionate love of old china, antique furniture, Georgian silver—with which my home is now filled."
From Risley's Landing they moved to Oregon City, where she lived for several years. She attended the private school of Dr. S. D. Pope, who often made her stand in the corner with her face to the wall so she could not make the other children laugh, but who gave her encouragement by praising her first compositions. Of the rest of her formal schooling she says in correction of another biographical myth:
You will sometimes find the "Oregon City Seminary" mentioned in connection with my education. This was a jest. The public school building from which I was graduated in Oregon City had many years before been a young ladies"seminary," and we used laughingly to refer to it as our "seminary."
It was during her school days at Oregon City that she had the author of a favorite book pointed out to her and found his personality formidable and disappointing:
I was about eleven when a schoolmate who was with me on the street, remarked with interest: "Here come Mr. Moss and Nora." I was instantly thrilled by the young woman's beauty and style. After they had passed, my companion said: "You know he wrote The Prairie Flower."
"What!" I cried. "That old man?"
That romantic tale which my sister had told or read to me as she rocked me to sleep in her arms—well, maybe he was tall and handsome when he wrote it! He was so stern that I always ran away at sight of him. His daughter was very charming. She was married and lived at Oregon City—a fascinating woman. Young girls adored her. He had a son, Volney, as tall and handsome as Nora. Their bearing was most aristocratic.
As she passed into her middle and later teens at Oregon City, she too had beauty and style, like Nora, and, in all the years that she has been a well-known author, no one reading her books and then seeing her could be disappointed. Not so much that she has al ways looked like a poet, having the lineaments of one perhaps less than Minnie Myrtle, but rather that she has been given a more universal outward grace that would suit any talent and go properly with any dis tinction. Pictures of her in her mature womanhood are familiar. There is a charming old-fashioned one of her at six, very sober, her lower lip forming a depression like slightly folded paper as it rises from the inward curve of her chin, her hair parted in the middle and straight except for a rebellious roach at the front. And there is another one of her at ten, her bobbed hair unparted, curly and disheveled; a photographic shadow still showing a little trench under neath her lower lip and showing now a dimple in the chin; her eyes, which we know were blue, in a clear and contemplative gaze, in promise of a great capacity to see and recognize; and impressed upon the beauty of her childish face was still that lingering neutrality between joy and sadness. Yet she was the little girl who made Dr. Pope's other pupils laugh; who was full of mischief and exploits; who had and has always retained a lively sense of humor.
At 14 she had her first poem published, as she has mentioned. The Oregon City editor who gave this contribution the hospitality of his columns was not wholly kind, for he was an arithmetical realist who could not see the difference between imaginative and actual truth. In a note he called attention to the youth of the author and pointed out that according to the next to the last stanza she would have been only four years old when she experienced the tragic love affair which the verses commemorated. That stanza, exceedingly good for a 14-year-old girl but of too long a retrospect, was as follows:
Ten years have flown since we sat there alone
In our hearts' sweet summer time,
But I'll never forget or cease to regret
Those days of rapture sublime.
This inconsiderate exposure finished her poetry writing for another year. There was another editor in town, of a more trustful and less analytic nature, who was also her Sunday school teacher. At the age of 1 6 she was taken into his newspaper office to learn the business from typesetting to editorial writing. His confidence in her progress was cheering for her but in the outcome rather hard on him. During his absence he left her to run the paper for a week while a vigorous political campaign was going on. It was in the course of this journalistic rise and fall, when she was no older than a modern high school girl, that she first met Sam. L. Simpson. About this time, also, she wrote her first short story. Its central figure was a burglar and it was not then or ever published.
She continued somewhat haphazardly with the writing of both prose and verse, and established the basis of a talent that received rapid and national recognition when it got started in earnest in 1890. Oregon City was the place of that preliminary development, but no significant published writing was done while her home was there. Her father died, and her sister married, became Carrie Blake Morgan and contributed to magazines. In that historic town, so richly-flavored and stimulating an environment in the 70's and 80's, she acquired a deep harmony with the Pacific Northwest which was to be her subject matter; and there, quite apart from a poetic ability as yet unconfirmed by any fame, she grew into an attractive young woman as glad to the sight of little girls as the stern old novelist's daughter Nora had been to her—and pleasing also in the eyes of a very discriminating young man. Before she left Oregon City, along in the middle 80's, she married Russell Carden Higginson.
He was from New York, a young man of New England culture and a descendant of the old Higginson family of that region. He was a druggist by trade. By that time Oregon City had been a community of genuine culture, and one of some adornment, for nearly half a century, but its young men seemed provincial in social accomplishments in comparison with him. He is remembered by those who knew him as a man with most exquisite manners and extremely courteous to women but of uncertain equanimity and with a hair-trigger temper. She always felt, according to her friends, that he did not sufficiently encourage or appreciate her literary work. After their marriage they resided for a while in Portland and then lived for about two years at La Grande, where he had a store and where, in a long riding habit, she went out through the Grand Ronde Valley on horseback twice a day. In the latter part of 1888 they removed to Bellingham. For many years he was the successful proprietor of a drug store there. He died in 1909.
While living in Oregon and later, she knew Joaquin Miller, who sent her pictures, letters, galley proofs of his poems and called her in his gallant way "the divine Ella Higginson." She did not know Minnie Myrtle Miller personally but through close acquaintance with a niece heard much about her, including the mention that has already been made in a previous chapter of Joaquin's icicly absence of uxoriousness. Following are some other remembrances, direct and hearsay, that she has of the Millers:
I was surprised to find what scant and ignorant mention Bancroft made of Joaquin and Minnie Myrtle. Minnie Myrtle had a sister who wrote a few poems. I did not see them until just before she died—about ten years ago—and
I hastily wrote and had printed a notice of them and heard that it made her "very happy," because "no one else had ever noticed them."
The dearest friend I ever had was a niece of Minnie Myrtle, who was a beautiful woman. I recall a portrait of her in the Oregonian, which won my childish fancy. Do not ever believe that Minnie Myrtle wrote any of the poems credited to him—as some Oregon critics claim. She wrote in an entirely different style, and he needed no assistance on his way to fame.
I still have some galley proofs of Joaquin's poems. He sent them to me long ago, and they are not of particular interest} but do have brief jottings in his execrable hand writing. I used to tack his letters on a wall and decipher from a distance with a field glass. Once a club here asked him to come up and give them a talk. He replied that he would come if "the divine Ella Higginson" would see him. But I was in Alaska. Of course, that adjective applied to me has clung as a great joke, for I am exactly the opposite.
When she moved to Bellingham in the late fall of 1888, it was not much like the cosmopolitan little city of today, and Washington was still a territory. She arrived at two o'clock in the morning on the old boat Idaho. She went afoot behind a guide with a lantern, her baggage following in a wheelbarrow, to the Whatcom House, the accommodations of which had been too highly recommended. It was little more than a sailor's boarding house. In its bar room a man was killed the night she stayed there. As soon as possible the next day she found temporary quarters elsewhere, until she could move into her own home far up the hill; and somewhere in residence on those glorious heights she has since remained.
Less than a year and a half after arriving at Bellingham, she began her literary work in a serious and regular way, and, though she now lived in Washing ton, she began it in Oregon. She was invited by H. L. Wells, the editor, to conduct a department in the old Portland West Shore. Her page was started in the number of March 8, 1890, and was called "Fact and Fancy for Women." Her first article dealt with divorce and, because of its advanced sentiments and recommendations for those days, attracted a good deal of notice. Though the West Shore has been declared with much justice "the best literary weekly ever published in the Pacific Northwest," its successful days were behind it and not before it in 1890. It had been published for 15 years but did not survive much longer. After her useful experience on its staff, how ever, she began contributing verse and stories to the national magazines and during the next 25 years was probably the most popular writer in the country at large from the Pacific Northwest.
Her literary work has been as editor, short story writer, travel writer, novelist, poet and song writer. In addition to her editing for the West Shore, she later conducted for several years the literary department of the Seattle Sunday Times.
Her earliest stories appeared in the Oregon Literary Vidette, a literary publication that enjoyed a short life in Salem. Her fiction then began to appear in such magazines as McClure's, Lippincott's, Leslie's Weekly, Short Stories, and The New Peterson. In the early 90's she entered "The Takin' In of Old Mis' Lane" in a McClure's Magazine contest for the best short story and won the first prize of $500 over 1000 competitors. Several years later, in 1914, she won an other $500 in a similar contest offered by Collier's, with the story "The Message of Anne Laura Sweet."
Books came next, at first by local publishers and then by the large Macmillan Company of New York. Following is a descriptive bibliography of her writings:
A Bunch of Western Clover. New Whatcom, Washington. Edson & Irish, Publishers. 1894.
This was her first book, a miniature paper-bound brochure, of 24 pages. It is now so rare that probably not more than a dozen copies are in existence. It contained "Four-Leaf Clover" and 25 other short poems, with two specifically about Oregon—"Sunrise on the Willamette" and "The Grand Ronde Valley."
The Flower That Grew in the Sand and Other Stories. Seattle. The Calvert Company. 1896.
This had illustrations by Frank Calvert, and its whole attractive format caused Eastern critics to express surprise that a book could be so well published in a far western town like Seattle. It was made up of 11 short stories that she had contributed to magazines, including the McClure's prize story. It was given favorable reviews. One who thought particularly well of it was William Henry Thorne, editor of the Globe Quarterly Review, New York, who had a heavy grouch against Joaquin Miller and resented the way other reviewers compared her work with his:
In clippings of notices that accompany the book, the Chicago Journal, the Northwest Magazine, the Chicago Graphic and other papers, plainly ignorant of all literary discrimination, compare Mrs. Higginson's work with Joaquin Miller's, intending to compliment Mrs. Higginson by such comparisons.
Such critics not only make me tired, they make me swear—in whispers, of course. The truth is, that Joaquin Miller was always a posing slouch: simply this and nothing more. He never wrote a perfect sentence or a perfect stanza of poetry in all his days. He is simply the Walt Whitman-cowboy literateur of the Western backwoods—the booted, open-throated, open-mouthed slouch of American literature. But Mrs. Higginson writes only perfect sentences. I am now speaking of her work as a literary matter. Either by some hereditary gift of ancient genius, or by suffering and writing and thinking and working till the sands of the Western seas have filtered the flowing thoughts of her soul to pure diamonds, she has mastered the art of writing.
From the Land of the Snow Pearls. New York. The Macmillan Company. 1897.
What happened in the case of this book was what Samuel A. Clarke hoped would happen with Sounds by the Western Sea. Of it Mrs. Higginson says:
Since leaving Oregon the one who has helped me more than all others together is Mr. George P. Brett, for many years president of the Macmillan Company, now succeeded by his son. He bought The Flower That Grew in the Sand, my first book of stories, as soon as he saw it and issued it as From the Land of the Snow Pearls, and published all my other books here and in London. He had a sublime faith in me, and even now blames himself that my books were not all great financial successes—when, of course, it is my fault alone. God forever bless a friend like that!
A Forest Orchid. New York. The Macmillan Company. 1897.
A book of short stories. Her good friend William Henry Thorne of the Globe Quarterly Review praised it as he had her other book and in doing so paid his respects to Joaquin Miller whom he so heartily disliked:
She has more art and more knowledge of human nature in a day than that long-haired and now obsolete Joaquin Miller ever had i n all his life, and yet some excellent fool critics have thought that her work was almost as good as his.
Mrs. Higginson, who had a different opinion of Joaqin Miller, knew then and knows now how much it meant to be his equal, and that in a more general estimate she was not and is not.
When the Birds Go North Again. New York. The Macmillan Company. 1898.
A book of poems. Mrs. Higginson asks:
Do you still have skylarks in Oregon? When I was a small child some German residents imported several pairs from Germany, placing them upon the Ladd estate. They lived and for many years were seen “soaring and singing.” When my book, When the Birds Go North Again,” was published I included a sonnet “Dawn on the Willamette” in which was a line about “a pilgrim skylark.” Jeannette Gilder, editor of the Critic, highly praised the book, but added: “A careful nature observer, like Burroughs, would not have made the fatal mistake of placing skylarks on the Willamette.” I wrote her the story and added that I thought the word “pilgrim” would
mean something to a careful critic. She never published the explanation.
In this book is another poem, “Hate,” which Mrs. Higginson has explained at some length for reasons contained in
the explanation:
I have never publicly answered a criticism of my work; but I
wish now to answer many bitter and ignorant criticisms of one of
my poems—“Hate”—in my volume When the Birds Go North Again. How anyone could read into that poem that it is I speaking,
is entirely beyond my understanding.
Many years ago, in Chicago, I saw Fanny Davenport play “Cleopatra.” . . . Her portrayal of a woman consumed with jealousy was so powerful that I was deeply impressed thereby, and the poem
formed itself in my mind; and, upon my return to my hotel, I made
the first rough draft of it at once. It was first published under the
title of “Cleopatra.”
I believe in “foreordination,” and I think it
was that which made me keep that first draft, bearing that title—and which has long been in the possession of Edith B. Carhart,
head of the Bellingham Public Library.
When it was included in my book, a critic advised me to name it
“Hate,” because it was the most powerful description of that devastating passion he had ever read.
I wrote a “murder” story once, also a “murder” poem; but have not, as yet, been accused of that crime!
The Snow Pearls. New York. The Macmillan Company. 1897. A book of poems.
Mariella; of Out-West. The Macmillan Company. 1904.
This is her only novel. After being long out of print, it was republished in 1924 by P. K. Pirret & Company in Tacoma. The embarrassment that the appearance of this novel caused her in her home town of Bellingham, was described by Herbert Bashford in the San Francisco Sunday Examiner Magazine in an article entitled "Seven Women on the War Path," which had this large-type introductory:
Seven angry women in Whatcom, Washington, has threatened the life of Ella Higginson. They claim identity with Mrs. Flush in that clever author's latest novel. With their shrill, excited treble is heard the sullen muttering of belligerent bassos, for several married
men unblushingly declare that they are Mr. Mallory, the too-gay Lothario of the book.
Hatred of the little novelist runs high in her home town; so high that the mails bring ugly anonymous letters to her door; so high that she is not allowed to venture upon the streets at any time unprotected, and has been practically a prisoner in her own house for weeks. She recently decided to take refuge in her native town in Oregon, but was warned not to come, because of violence at the hands of certain persons also clamoring for kinship with her book.
This Sunday newspaper feature was highly colored, but this novel and other stories did stir up a good deal of indignation among her neighbors for the way they thought they were being portrayed. One of them has said:
Mrs. Higginson used her friends in her stories, often making them recognizable but putting strange dialect forms of speech in her characterization of them, which turned them into enemies.
Mrs. Higginson has disclaimed such fidelity of realism and told of Mariella to a newspaper reporter.
I did not put one real person in the book. I did not have in mind for any character one of these people—not one who has been chosen from real life as exactly fitting it.
Then the reporter observed:
Whenever Mrs. Higginson draws her brows together and says with guiltless solemnity, "I only take the characteristics of several
persons to make one character," she is interrupted by spontaneous bursts of mirth. "Of course, of course. That is precisely the way with Mrs. Humphrey Ward . . . and every other writer who gets into fixes by the 'absolute verity' of his delineations."
Five or six years before Mariella she started a novel which she never finished. "Owing to illness, death and other
misfortunes in her family, she was unfitted for work and was compelled to give it up." She worked for about three years on Mariella under difficulties. This one novel that she wrote seems to have had and to have retained a closer hold on her affection than any one of her other books.
The Voice of April-Land. New York. The Macmillan Company. 1906.
A book of poems. This had its reminiscences of Oregon, especially in its dedication, of which she has said:
The sonnet used in dedicating The Voice of April-Land to the pioneers, was meant more for those of Oregon than of this state,
because those coming after 1850 at the latest were not pioneers. This is one of my best sonnets.
Alaska, the Great Country. New York. The Macmillan
Company. 1908. A guide book and a book of travel, description, history and romance.
The Vanishing Race and Other Poems. Bellingham. C. M. Sherman. Press of S. B. Irish & Company. 1911.
A paper bound pamphlet of 28 pages containing 21 poems, among them the sonnet "The Pioneers of the West" and "The Little Church at Sitka" with the second stanza:
The little church at Sitka— It was so dim and sweet! Along the curving, silver beach We heard the soft waves beat; We knelt alone—while Holiness Went by on sandalled feet.
As a writer of lyrics set to music by well-known composers Mrs. Higginson has been the most popular of all poets of the Pacific Northwest. At least 50 famous composers have found musical settings for her poems, among which have been "Four-Leaf Clover;" "Cradle Song of the Fisherman's Wife;" "Hey, Alders, Hang Thy Tassels Out;" "The Lamp in the West" and others. They have been sung by such noted singers as Calve, Caruso, Crossley, Williams and
McCormack. "Four-Leaf Clover," written in an apple orchard in Bellingham in the spring of 1890 and first published in the Portland West Shore, has
been especially popular. Among those who have set
it to music are Leila Brownell, Charles Willeby, Horatio Parker and Whitney Coombs. She herself prefers
the settings of the first two. It is in the official song
of the Washington Federation of Women's Clubs, of
which she is an honorary member.
Of her methods of writing, as reported over the 45-year period of her productive life, the one that has received the most mention is good hard work. William Henry Thorne spoke of her perfect sentences, and he spoke truly. They are that way in letters, even in letters written in pencil while she is ill in bed. No comma is ever missing, never does one of them fail to parse, whatever the complexity of objects in a paragraph the antecedent is always there with shining clarity, the meaning usually has adornment and always has precision. Though she went to school and not to a very advanced school in Oregon City for only a few years, no professor of rhetoric with all the rules freshly in his head could ever find a place where his pencil, red or blue, could leave its accusing check. The unblemished technique of her poetry and its singing quality are part of the perfection she has aimed at so long that carelessness and short-cuts are alien to her habits. Following is a consolidation of three comments made by her at various times in description of how she writes: I do not observe any set period for work. Nevertheless, I
believe that it is quite possible to sit down and write a few words and thus work yourself into a mood. I never had any rules nor any advice until I did not need any. My advice to beginners is simply this: Write all the time. If you like it well enough to have patience, you will finally gain original expression.... It is only the worker that wins success. "I work while others play," is the best motto I know for success. . . . When I was writing Alaska, the Great Country I was at my desk at eight o'clock in the morning and worked till five o'clock in the afternoon; then from eight at night till one or two in the morning, for a full year. Some of my poems are written a dozen times before they suit me.
Her home used to be referred to as being located on one of the high terraces of Sehome Hill. With municipal exactness, it is now 605 High Street, Bellingham. She and her husband picked out its site in 1892, and built the house, which became one of the sights of the town and is now a large, ivy-clad, old-fashioned place, with views from all its windows. It looks out upon Bellingham Bay and is several hundred feet above it—and, still further, it looks out upon the white Olympics and the blue smoothness of the Gulf of Georgia. It is filled with books, and with antiques—old china, Georgian silver, old Dutch marquetry, buhl work, old crystal chandeliers, English furniture from British Columbia and Russian samovars from Alaska. "I don't mind dying," she says, "but I just can't leave my home."
On a side saddle and in a long habit, she mastered some very spirited horses in the Grand Ronde days
soon after her marriage. For several years riding was
her chief recreation. "I became more famous as a rider," she remarks, "than I will ever be as a writer." In the period when she was turning out her books of
stories and poems, she spent more time with her horse
and her dogs than she did with people, but she has
never been lacking in sociability. In later days, with a
few intimate friends, she has enjoyed playing contract
bridge and hearing and telling clever stories. During
an illness of nearly three years, she has been ordered
to remain quietly at home, seeing no one and doing
nothing, "but," she points out, "they can't keep me from thinking." So she writes poems of fresh beauty and perfect technique and letters full of cheerfulness and bright philosophy, in extemporaneous sentences that are technically flawless, with an unerring impact upon the understanding and the senses.
The grace of that literary mastery, a brave spirit, honesty without deviation but without austerity, wisdom without bitterness, generosity, gentility, friendliness—these characterize the Ella Higginson of today and, if the records may be believed, have long characterized her. This essay has been partly based upon perhaps 50 other articles about her and her books, and
where they refer to her personal qualities their testimony is unqualified as to her charm as a woman. She
has frequently overworked, has been subject to bursts
of temper, has not been one to take a dare, has played
jokes upon her friends with her realism, has been
marked by a few but only a very few literary idiosyncracies, and, as part of her strong sincerity, has had a practical interest in the success of her writings. But
she is so honest that when she spoke of skylarks in
Oregon she was careful to call them fugitive skylarks and said the school she attended in Oregon City was not a girl's seminary at all but only a public school. And rather than misrepresent an inevitably increasing age, she adopted an unbroken but gracious reticence towards it; and so fair that she would not furnish it to this biographer because she had never furnished it to others, though, with ingenious accommodation, offering to leave it in an envelope addressed to him as part of her will, a charming bequest of a lovely secret, when you come to think of it. So lacking in jealousy that when one critic called her greater than Joaquin Miller and others said she was almost as great, she kept her admiration for him and quoted some of his lines to keynote her novel, and, when she knew for sure he was greater, declared that statements of his plagiarism were false and that he needed no help to fame. Such engaging instances could be multiplied.
A close woman friend has described her in this way:
Ella Higginson is five feet five and a half inches tall, of medium complexion, is proud of her very tiny feet, has a large nose, blue eyes, large mouth and a sad, strong face.
Her face was so when she was ten, as has been described, and a
dozen portraits of her during various periods of her literary life show an absence alike of gladness and of gravity—no smile, yet no sign so definite as grief; not wistful even; always so wide open, so unhesitant and so clear; the same in surmise and retrospect, the same in the little maiden in Oregon City and the famous woman in Bellingham. Were the cameras wrong? We know her as a witty conversationalist, as fun-loving, as having a lively sense of humor, as possessing a deep and sustained cheerfulness. But there is her sad face as caught by a dozen
photographers and there is the confirmation of her
poems, several of which mention death and verge on
the melancholy. Perhaps she can give the answer: "I have had a full, rich, everyday existence—extracting
humor at my own expense from everything, to help me bear the tragedies of life."
All of her books except Alaska, the Great Country and the Tacoma edition of Mariella; of Out-West are out of print, but, though well-worn, they may still be
found in many public libraries, where the records
show they continue to be extensively read. Her songs are
still sung in many states and different lands, and the
school children still know her well, including those in Oregon, though they have not told her so. "It is a sadness," she says, "that for several years I have received letters from school-children—about one a week—in every state in the Union except my own Oregon."
Oregon has not been celebrated at all in her prose. Her stories have not had their settings in the state, though some of the childhood meals at Risley's Landing have been the basis for some of the gastronomic
descriptions that they contain. Many of her poems have dealt with themes common to Oregon and Washington and in general to the Pacific Northwest, and
several of them have been specifically about Oregon.
Four-Leaf Clover
First Printed in the West Shore, Portland, 1890
I know a place where the sun is like gold, And the cherry blooms burst with snow,
And down underneath is the loveliest nook, Where the four-leaf clovers grow.
One leaf is for hope, and one is for faith, And one is for love, you know, And God put another one in for luck — If you search, you will find where they grow.
But you must have hope, and you must have faith, You must love and be strong—and so— If you work, if you wait, you will find the place Where the four-leaf clovers grow.
The Grand Ronde Valley
From a Bunch of Western Clover, 1894
Ah, me! I know how like a golden flower The Grand Ronde valley lies this August night, Locked in by dimpled hills where purple light Lies wavering. There at the sunset hour Sink downward, like a rainbow tinted shower, A million colored rays, soft, changeful, bright. Later the moon rises, round and white, And three Blue Mountain pines against it tower, Lonely and dark. A coyote's mournful cry Sinks from the canyon —whence the river leaps, A blade of silver underneath the moon. Like restful seas the yellow wheat-fields lie, Dreamless and still. And while the valley sleeps, O hear!—the lullabies that low winds croom.
The Lamp in the West
From a Bunch of Western Clover, 1894
Venus has lit her silver lamp Low in the purple West, Breathing a soft and mellow light Upon the sea's full breast; It is the hour when mead and wood In fine seed-pearls are dressed.
Far out, far out the restless bar Starts from a troubled sleep, Where roaring thro' the narrow straits The meeting waters leap; But still that shining pathway leads Across the lonely deep.
When I sail out the narrow straits Where unknown dangers be, And cross the troubled, moaning bar To the mysterious sea— Dear God, wilt thou not set a lamp Low in the West for me?
The Evergreen Pine
Of this poem Mrs. Higginson says: "'The Evergreen Pine' was
being written nearly all my life. It was one of several poems—like
the 'Grand Ronde Valley'—that lived in me from childhood, growing
line by line every time I saw a pine in its full beauty in spring. (I
paused here to look out upon two near my window. I dug them up
in the woods when they were a foot high and planted them here my
self and now they are big and lovely, and light all their candles for
me every May). The poem was finally finished and copyrighted by
myself and printed upon a special card as a gift to the State Federation of Women's Clubs for their convention in 1915. That was the first printing, but it was probably copied in a Federation bulletin. I have considered it one of my best poems, but may not be a
competent judge."
The rivers to the ocean flow, The sunsets burn and flee; The stars come to the darkling sky, The violets to the lea; But I stay in one lone sweet place And dream of the blue sea. The harebell blooms and is away The salmon spawns and dies; The oriole nests and is on the wing, Calling her sweet good-bys....
But I, when blossom and fruit are gone, Yearn, steadfast, to the skies.
I am a prayer and a praise, A sermon and a song; My leaf-chords thrill at the wind's will To nocturnes deep and strong; Or the sea's far lyric melodies They echo and prolong. When April flashing up the hill Freshens my green attire, I light my candles, tall and pale, With holy scarlet fire— And straight their incense mounts to God, Pure as a soul's desire.
My branches poise upon the air, Like soft and level wings; My trembling leaves the wind awakes To a harp of emerald strings— Or thro' the violet silences A golden vesper sings. I am a symbol and a sign... Thro' blue or rose or gray; Thro' rain and dark; thro' storms of night; Thro' opaline lights of day— Slowly and patiently up to God I make my beautiful way.
Oregon
The heart at thought of Oregon Quickens with old delights; Balm-shaken fragrance of the rain, Blue gentian days And emerald ways And red-rose nights. The music of Willamette's falls That, lost, still pleads and calls;
The song a thrust left on the hill; Thro' fir-arcaded silences The lyric laughter of a rill.
The rosy nun, Calypso sweet, In twin-flower cloisters set, Telling a dew-drop rosary; The eglantine And the columbine And the violet; The dogwood stars of velvet snow Thro' hemlock ways that glow; And, hardy comrade of the pioneer, The fireweed flinging Color far To beautify and cheer.
The brilliant stars that, falling, flash God's word along the night To white peaks shining on the sky; The opaline glow Of the rainbow, Tremulous, bright, Spanning the laurelled River-of-Dreams, The mystical River-of-Dreams, That bore the ship so dear to me Thro' orchards heavy with fragrant bloom Down to the far blue calling sea.
Heart that once loves thee, Oregon, Must love thee thro' the years; And at the very thought of thee The old desire, Passion and fire, Burns failure's tears. River that bore my ship away, Blue of my skies has turned to gray . . . But somehow, somewhere, out in the sea, Thou wilt find my dreams of the Long Ago And bring them back to me.
