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.
