CHAPTER 15
Minnie Myrtle Miller
I watch the red sun wed the sea
Beside your home ... the tides will fall
And rise, hut nevermore shall we
Stand hand in hand and watch them flow,
As we once stood . . . Christ! this is so!
JOAQUIN MILLER: Myrrh.
Minnie Myrtle Miller, though one called upon to make the sacrifice, was creative enough in her attitude to grant in her distress that literature is worth any heavy price that might have to be paid for it. "Good sometimes comes of evil," she said. "Our separation and sorrows produced the poems of 'Myrrh' and 'Even So'." In all her unhappy actions and public display of her troubles she was a person of three conflicting moods: a wife out of favor; a tender and unselfish woman truly wishing her husband to be one of the great poets of the world; a poet herself, with a feeling of harsh frustration that her almost equal talents should be choked and smothered by uncontrollable circumstances, while his through ruthless doffing of responsibility should flower and grow.
The latter mood, a kind of professional jealousy, was encouraged by her women friends and by some of the Oregon newspapers, like the Albany Democrat previously quoted. In keeping with this opinion, Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor said of her:
Miller married a woman who as a lyrical poet was fully his equal; but while he went forth free from their brief wedded life to challenge the plaudits of the world, she sank beneath the blight of poverty, and the weight of woman's inability to grapple with the human throng which surges
over and treads down those that faint by the way; therefore,
