As far asunder as the poles and the antithesis of Oscar Wilde was the next poet to dedicate a verse to me. He was Joaquin Miller, poet of the Sierras, a child of nature and perhaps the most picturesque personality of the literary world. It was at Lord Houghton's house in Arlington Street, London, that I happened to meet the famous Californian....After dinner there was the usual reception, and presently [Lord Houghton] led up to me a very tall, lean man, with a pale intellectual face, yellow hair so long that it lay in curls about his shoulders, a closely cropped beard, and a dreamy expression in his light eyes. I don't remember what he wore, except that it was unconventional. He was so new and strange, that his apparel, whatever it was, seemed to complete the picture. After a while he disappeared from the group surrounding me, and at the end of the evening he returned and read me from a torn sheet of paper the following verse:
To the Jersey Lily: If all God's world a garden were And women were but flowers, If men were bees that busied there Through endless summer hours, O! I would hum God's gardens through For honey until I came to you. |
And it is the only verse I believe. Two or three evenings later I went to a concert at Lady Brassey's, who had not long returned from a world's tour with Lord Brassey in the Sunbeam, and at the foot of the broad staircase of the house stood Joaquin Miller. He seemed to be waiting for me, and as I walked upstairs to greet my hostess, he backed before me, scattering rose leaves, which he had concealed in his broad sombrero, upon the white marble steps, and saying with fervour: "Thus be your path in life!"
Often after this we met. He became a lion of the literary world; his poems were on every table. Rosetti, Swinburne, Tennyson, were among his admirers. He had lived a life of adventure, too, beginning by running away from school to mine for gold. He had been adopted by Indians, been imprisoned for some imaginary offense, had escaped from jail through the aid of an Indian girl, swam a river with her to freedom, and married her--all before twenty! At least, that was the story which was circulated in London, and which added piquancy to the interest created by his virile personality.