Miller, Cincinnatus Heine
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Cincinnatus Heine (1841-), an American poet known usually by his pen name of Joaquin Miller. He was a native of Indiana, but spent most of his life on the Pacific coast. He was by turns a miner, a lawyer, a judge, and an editor. He tried at first to sell his poems in the East, but, unable to do so, he took them to London, where they were published under the title of Songs of the Sierras and brought their author considerable fame. Other volumes of poems are: Songs of the Sun Lands, Songs of the Desert, Songs of Italy, and Songs of Mexican Seas. He produced several works of fiction: The Baroness of New York , The Danites of the Sierras, and '49, or the Gold-Seekers of the Sierras. Of the following quotations, the first is the opening stanza of Miller's well known poem, Columbus; the other gives a hint of the stand he took regarding his relations to his fellow men: Behind him lay the gay Azores, Behind the Gates of Hercules, Before him not the ghost of shores, Before him only shoreless seas. The good mate said, "Now must we pray, For, lo, the very stars are gone; Speak, Admiral, now what shall I say? "Why, say, 'Sail on, sail on, sail on and on.'" In men whom men condemn as ill, I find so much of goodness still; In men whom men pronounce divine, I find so much of sin and blot, I hesitate to draw the line Between the two, when God has not.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's gave Miller's dates as "(1841-)" and left the second blank open; he died at his Oakland hilltop home, The Hights, on 17 February 1913, and most scholars now put his birth around 1837 rather than the later date he preferred to give. The fame Aiton's took for granted did not last: "Columbus," with its "Sail on, sail on, sail on and on," was a fixture of American school recitation into the 1930s and has since almost vanished from classrooms and anthologies, and Miller is read today less as a poet than as a study in self-invention — the frontiersman costume, the borrowed name, the tall tales about his mining and Indian-fighting years. His grounds survive as Joaquin Miller Park in the Oakland hills, better known now than any of the Songs volumes listed here.
Written for this edition, 2026.