of Byron's poems, which he prized very highly and read with great interest.
He entered, at sixteen, the Willamette University, at Salem, Oregon, from which he was graduated in the class of '65. He immediately took up the study of the law, and passed the required examination for admission to practice in 1866, but, not being of the required age, he was not admitted until 1867.
His prospects in the practice were reasonably good, though his characteristic timidity qualified his deserved success. In 1870 he abandoned the practice of law, assumed the editorial charge of the "Corvalis Gazette," and entered on a general journalistic career, which he pursued through the rest of his life.
In 1868 he married Miss Julia Humphrey, to whom these poems are dedicated. She was noted for her beauty and enrapturing voice in music his "sweet-throated thrush," of whom he writes :
Lurlina, Heaven flies not
From souls it once has blessed;
First love may fade, but dies not,
Though wounded and distressed.
"Though after-days deride us
With Hymen's broken rings,
We know that once beside us
An angel furled his wings."
And, though after-days did deride him with Hymen's broken rings, he never faltered or wavered in his devotion to his first and only love. There were born
