What strong uncommon men were these—
These settlers hewing to the seas!
Great horny-handed men, and tan,
Men blown from many a barren land
Beyond the sea, men red of hand.
And men in love, and men in debt.
Like David's men in battle set;
And men whose very hearts had died,
Who only sought these woods to hide
Their wretchedness, held in the van.
Yet every man among them stood
Alone, along that sounding wood.
And every man somehow a MAN.
They pushed the matted wood aside,
They tossed the forest like a toy;
That grand, forgotten race of men—
The boldest band that yet has been
Together, since the siege of Troy!
Another Miller, of a different cast of thought, is Mrs. Lischen M. Miller, the wife of Joaquin Miller's brother. Mrs. Miller was a Miss Cogswell, the daughter of a Lane County farmer, and heretofore noticed as one of the founders of the Pacific Monthly. Mrs. Miller has marked ability for poetry as well as prose composition, and has produced many poems that have been sought for by eastern magazines. The following taken from Putnam's Monthly of December, 1907, is a fair sample of her verse, entitled "Sea-Drift."
Once in a twelvemonth given.
At midnight of the year,
To rise from their graves as vapor
That shadows the face of fear,
And up through the green of surges,
A sweep to the headlands base,
Like a white mist blown to landward.
They come to this lofty place —
Pale as the heart of sorrow
Dim as a dream might be—
The souls of ship wrecked sailors,
And them that are drowned at sea.
In swift and silent procession
Circle the lonely sweep,
Where the wild wind faints before them,
And hushed is the roar of the deep.
Another poet of great promise, whose beautiful verse was known to but few readers when death silenced her lyre forever, was Mrs. Marion Cook Stow.
Born in Sandusky, Ohio, June 7, 1875, Marion Cook came to Oregon when a child. She received her education in the public schools and early evinced an apitude for verse-making. She was particularly a student and lover of the outdoor life, and the major portions of poems that have emanated from her facile pen breathes the spirits of the wild woods and a love for green things-a-growing.
Perhaps the best known of her longer poems is "Where Flows Hood River," which was given to the public in 1907. This was followed by a prose story for children, "The Child and the Dream," which won enconiums from press and public. A bound collection of shorter verse is called "Nature Sonnets." Last
