Have written lots of stuff here. I have been happy here. I have worked and not thought of the past. But to-morrow I am going down to Hull, cross the Channel, and see the French and Germans fight. For I have stopped work and begun to look back. . . . I see the snow-peaks of Oregon all the time when I stop work. . . . And then the valley at the bottom of the peaks; the people there; the ashes on the hearth; the fire gone out. . . . The old story of Orpheus in hell has its awful lesson. I, then, shall go forward and never look back any more. Hell, I know, is behind me. There cannot be worse than hell before me. . . . Yet for all this philosophy and this setting the face forward, the heart turns back.
After a glimpse of the war, he began on November 2, 1870, his adventures in London—which he found delightfully different from New York—by walking straight to Westminster Abbey, guided only by the spirit in his feet. Later, he continued his passionate pilgrimage by looking up the haunts of Washington Irving and Bayard Taylor, and he lived for a while in Camberwell, because Browning had lived there. In February, 1871, he was lodged in a garret of the poet Cowley's house, "right back of the Abbey," looking out on Virginia creepers planted by Queen Elizabeth, and listening to the sound of the city's bells. Refreshed from his bath in the stream of poetic tradition and "atmospherically" inspired, Miller made a little book called Pacific Poems, containing "Arazonian" (sic) and
