But every man wakens now and then from the lethargy of the soul which we call 'routine'; the 'crowded hour of glorious life' comes flaming; for most of us it passes with no record but regret; the lyric poet makes it eternal in his song. He sings the history of his soul; and, if he is a real poet, his music is not always gay. There is abundant sunlight in Joaquin Miller's poetry, but there are also shadows.
'So life is but a day of weary fretting,
As a sickly babe for its mother gone;
And I fold my hands, only this regretting,
That I have writ no thought or thing, not one,
That lives, or earns a cross or cryptic stone!'
"Joaquin Miller wrote thus pensively many years ago, undervaluing his own work, for he has written many things that will live, those very lines not least surely, in all their despairing beauty. His lyrical gift is clear and true. Even in his boyhood Joaquin Miller sang for immortality—and to what listeners! Keats was scorned in England, Shelley was anathematized at Oxford; but think of a poet, a boy poet, with the oddities of genius, the divinity in him only half set free, twanging his lyre in Eugene fifty years ago. . ." (48).
The Telegram had a long and honorable record. It was handicapped in its earlier years by its relation to the powerful Oregonian. The public got the impression, not always borne out by the facts, that Telegram policies were dictated by its older sister publication. There was, no doubt, a feeling on the part of Telegram editors that it was not well to let the Telegram reverse the Oregonian in any important policy. Yet, on occasions when this was done, nothing happened. Harvey Scott, with all his personal strength, didn't seem to bother much when an editorial writer on his own paper disagreed with him and made the paper's stand appear inconsistent. (49). Editors and managing editors, generally, were clever, including such men as Paul R. Kelty, later editor of the Oregonian.
John F. Carroll was a crusading type of editor, and he had a free hand while Edgar Piper was editor of the Oregonian and later under the enterprising and public-spirited Wheelers, neither of whom really was a newspaper man but both of whom had a high sense of public responsibility and a keen desire to make their newspaper serve the public to the limit of its powers. One of their expensive adventures in the arena of journalistic ethics was their advocacy of prohibition in the old wet days. There were others. The afternoon field, too, was occupied by active competitors, and Portland business was not always good. The failure of the Wheeler regime on the Telegram can be classed as a major journalistic disaster in Portland.
The succeeding Brockhagen-Fleischhacker management never
