room, seeking for the golden spots and the butterfly of Boum-Boum, as a lover seeks his dream. "No," said the child, in his plaintive voice, "No-it is not Boum-Boum."

The clown standing by the bed, cast upon the little one a look of infinite tenderness and grace. Shaking his head and regarding the anxious father and the weeping mother, he said gently, "He is right. It is not Boum-Boum," and hastily left the room.

"I shall never see him again, never again," now constantly repeated the child, with a voice growing more and more feeble.

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Boum-Boum is perhaps there-there, where the little François is soon going!"

But suddenly, half an hour later, the door opened brusquely, and in his black costume spotted with gold, the yellow cap upon his head, the golden butterfly upon his breast, and the red one on his back, a great smile upon his powdered face,-Boum-Boum, the real Boum-Boum, he of the circus, the hero of little François, appeared.

And on his little white bed, a living joy in his laughing eyes, weeping, happy, saved, the child clapped his feeble hands, weakly cried, "Bravo," and with the gaiety of his seven years, said, "It is he! It is he this time. Look! it is Boum-Boum--my BoumBoum. Good morning, Boum-Boum."

IV.

When the doctor came to pay his second visit that day, he found seated by the bed

side of his little patient a pale-faced clown, who made the hild laugh and laugh again, and who said to him, while stirring a bit of sugar in a cup of broth, "Thou knowest, if thou dost not drink, little François, that Boum-Boum will not come again. Is it not good?"

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"Very good, thank you, Boum-Boum. " "Doctor, said the clown, "do not be jealous. It seems to me, however, that my grimaces have done him more good than your prescriptions." The relieved parents sobbed, but this time it was with joy.

And until the little François was able to be up, every day a carriage stopped before the house of the workman and from it a gentleman descended, dressed in a frock coat, the collar of which was turned up, and underneath was the costume of the clown, as he appeared at the circus, with his kind, smiling, powdered face.

"What do I owe you?" said, at the end of his child's convalescence, Jacques Le Grand to Monsieur Moréno, "for indeed I owe you a great deal. "

The clown held out to the parents his two great Hercules-like hands and said with his gentle voice, "Only a grasp of the hand." Then kissing hastily each red cheek of the cured, happy child, he laughingly added, "And the permission to put on my cards, 'Boum-Boum, docteur-acrobate-Physician of the little François.'

E. E. C.

ON Sunday, the 27th of February, in Cleveland, Ohio, died Edward Rowland Sill: a writer of a distinction not wide, but exceptionally real and sound; a teacher of extraordinary zeal and influence; a man of great and varied intellectual power, of singular gifts and graces, and peculiar nobility of personal character.

Professor Sill was, all in all, the foremost man of letters California has ever had; and has done more than any one else for the interests of literature here. Two or three more brilliant writers have been far more widely known, and have done far more to give a name for literary achievement to the State; but Professor Sill's writings have been the least part of his literary influence here. As critic, teacher, inspirer, helper, in every possible way, and at all times, during many years, his work was arduous, and his services inestimable. The OVERLAND MONTHLY owes its revival to him; and in all ways open to him he has been its nearest friend and best counselor. This might alone be reason enough for the following memorial notes; but his educational work in this community deserves record even more than his literary; and his personal character and influence perhaps most of all. It is not easy to write of him and his work from any point of view; for so strenuously and successfully did he always strive to withdraw himself from notice, that none but his near friends have now the knowledge necessary to speak of him; and any memorial must be written by a hand weighted with consciousness of personal loss and with recollection of his own horror of publicity. Yet it is due to the community, which hears so much of the event when a man of large material achievement, or even of bad

eminence, goes out of it, that such influence and work as Professor Sill's should not be allowed to pass lightly from memory, as of little consequence.

To the general public, Professor Sill was known chiefly by his poetry. This would have been far more widely known, had its author made even ordinary effort to have it So. He wrote far more from the simple impulse to express himself than from any desire of reputation. He avoided, rather than sought, recognition for his poems. He scattered them freely in periodicals whose quality he approved, without reference to their ability to make him known. He disliked and sometimes forbade reviews and notices of himself, even when these were entirely genuine, spontaneous, and cordial; and of the advertising and clambering methods by which many magazine poets are now achieving reputations, he had an unbounded horror. "It seems to me," he said, "this morbid appetite to be heard of is the most disgusting disease of this time. For heaven's sake let us all stick to anonymity as the only way to keep in respectable society." He wrote much anonymously, and if he saw a poem thus secretly launched traveling still uncredited from paper to paper, and even into collections, he took pleasure in his security from observation. He never tried to make a collection of his poems. In 1867, when about twenty-six years old, he allowed a friend, Mr. Holt, the New York publisher, to print a volume, (The Hermitage and other Poems. Also with the imprint of H. H. Bancroft, San Francisco,) containing probably most, but not all his poems up to that time written and preserved; and upon leaving California, in January, 1883, he printed privately, as a

parting memento to his friends, a little book (The Venus of Milo, and Other Poems) of some thirty poems. Probably the scrapbooks of his friends contained at the time about as many more, clipped mostly from the Christian Union, the Galaxy, the first series of the OVERLAND, and the Californian.

These two volumes contain all that has ever been collected. Since then, his signature has appeared quite frequently in the Century and Atlantic, and in the OVER

LAND.

Few strangers have thus been allowed by Professor Sill to make sufficiently full acquaintance with his poetry for a fair critical estimate; nevertheless, to strangers this must be left. Some of its traits may well be spoken of here, however:-

It was, before all things, genuine. So earnest and honest, so directly from his own heart and convictions was it, that even when printed anonymously, it would always yield the secret of its authorship to a sufficiently careful scrutiny. In all writing

Professor Sill valued most the substancethe worthy thought worthily conceivedand he felt a weariness, mounting sometimes to impatience, of the poetry of the day, with its excess of form and tenuity of matter. He could himself afford to throw into a passing phrase or reference, matter enough to supply a modern sonnet :

"When the sea-wind swings its evening censer,
Till the misty incense hides the altar,
And the long-robed shadows, lowly kneeling."
The Singer's Confession.)

"Till many a moon had bloomed and blanched above her head." (First Love and Fantasy.)

"For life is like the legendary bird The Christ-child's hands were moulding out of clay:

While we are shaping it with eager care, We look up startled, for the bird has flown!" (Man, the Spirit.)

Yet while he could value careless poetry that had power in it, and was impatient of mere empty finish of workmanship, he valued external perfection highly, took great pleasure in it in the work of such a master VOL. IX--28.

as Matthew Arnold, and sought it with increasing fastidiousness in his own work. He had an infallible ear for the music of verse, and his was always perfect lyricallyoften, especially in his later poems, leaving conventional and flowing rhythms for a less obvious, but more complex and noble melody, such as he praised in Emerson's poetry, (OVERLAND MONTHLY, Oct., 1884, p. 442.) His diction, too, was fine, just, and noble, without affectations, carelessness, or over-ornament, and was capable both of a high imaginative beauty in figure, and of a perfectly poetic dignity of literal phrase. Thus:

"When the low music makes a dusk of sound
About us, and the viol or far-off horn
Swells out above it like a wind forlorn,
That wanders seeking something never found.”
A Face at a Concert.)

What need have I to fear-so soon to die?
Let me work on, not watch and wait in dread:
What will it matter, when that I am dead,
That they bore hate or love who near me lie?
'Tis but a lifetime, and the end is nigh

At best or worst. I will lift up my head And firmly, as with inner courage, tread Mine own appointed way, on mandates high." (Quem Metui Moritura?)

Professor Sill's poetry had for the most part only a few themes, and these often repeated. He wrote from his heart, and was little moved to creation by the simply dramatic or picturesque. He was very far from being merely a poet of his own moods, however. The beauty of nature, and the greater human subjects--the mystery of life, the longing of man for God, loyalty to humanity and duty, courage, patience, selfforgetfulness, service-with an occasional pure and wistful love-song, and an occasional bit of highly sensitive fancy: these are the themes that run, with a reiteration pathetic and noble, throughout his poems. Yet in the very latest ones his range of subject has widened; and remembering that he had but just begun to make so much as an avocation of poetry that absorbing and exhausting work had confined his poems to the occasional overflow of an insistent mood -it is impossible to say in what directions they might have developed.

Stand stiffly to it, and wrestle with the storm!
While the tall eucalyptus' feathery tops
Tremble and toss and stream with quivering light.
Hark! when it lulls a moment at the ear,
The fir-trees sing their sea-song:-now again
The roar is all about us like a flood;

And like a flood the fierce light shines, and burns
Away all distance, till the far blue ridge
That rims the ocean rises close at hand,
And high, Prometheus-like, great Tamalpais
Lifts proudly his grand front, and bears his scar,
Heaven's scathe of wrath, defiant like a god.”
(The North Wind.)
The following quotations are characteris-
tic of his touch in speaking of Nature:-
"From thy white forehead's breadth of calm, the
hair,

Sweeps lightly, as a cloud in windless air; Placid thy brows, as that still line at dawn, Where the dim hills along the sky are drawn, When the last stars are drowned in deeps afar." (The Venus of Milo.) "Now the first stars begin to tremble forth, Like the first instruments of an orchestra Touched softly, one by one." "Listen! A deep and solemn wind on high; The shafts of shining dust shift to and fro; The columned trees sway imperceptibly,

(Evening.)

And creak as mighty masts when trade winds blow.

The cloudy sails are set; the earth-ship swings Along the sea of space to grander things." (Among the Redwoods.) "Still dance the shadows on the grass at play, Still move the clouds like great, calm thoughts

away,

Nor haste, nor stay." (The Secret.) But even more characteristic are these: "The unseen beauty that doth faintly gleam, In stars, and flowers, and waters where they roll; The unheard music, whose faint echoes even

is approached from many sides, and always
in the light of a strong and trained intellect.
For it is to be remembered that he was in
all the main activities of his life not poet
and dreamer, but a most clear-headed and
industrious student, and a hard worker in
practical prose activities: and even as in
these the poetic and emotional side of his
character lighted and vivified all he did,
so his poetry was rarely from any detached
emotional mood, or superficial fancy, but
penetrated with his intellectual convictions.
and daily principles. Science strongly af-
fected his thoughts of life and its mysteries.
"I know we eddy round the sun;
When has it dizzied any one?

I know the round worlds draw from far,
Through hollow systems, star to star;
But who has e'er upon a strand

Of those great cables laid his hand?
What reaches up from room to room
Of chambered earth, through glare or gloom,
Through molten flood and fiery blast,
And binds our hurrying feet so fast?

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"Tis not in seeking,
'Tis not in endless striving:
Thy quest is found:
Be still and listen;

Be still and drink the quiet
Of all around.

Not for thy crying,

Not for thy loud beseeching,

Will peace draw near:

Rest, with palms folded;

Rest, with thine eyelids fallen

Lo! peace is here."

(Peace.) Professor Sill was a poet not merely in the sense that he wrote poetry, but in that in which old-fashioned writers like to speak of the poet "as a being of different type in himself from other men. The qualities of his poetry permeated his whole life and character. But so also, and even more powerfully, did a totally different range of qualities. As suggested above, his life occupations were intellectual. An old friend said of him that he united in the highest degree he had ever known, the poetic and the scientific endowment. This, and more than this, was true. Professor Sill's own characterization of the dual quality in Emerson's mind, applies somewhat to his own: "His mind was the typical Yankee mind: acute, shrewd, practical, and at the same time, imaginative. It was, in the Yankee phrase, gumption, horse-sense, linked with seraphic vision. Love of truth, in the end, was always stronger in him than love of beauty. His passion for merely intellectual truth, for knowledge, and that of all kinds, made him an eager and arduous student, from very childhood to the end of his life. His capacity of toil was great. His universality of grasp and breadth of interest was miraculous: abstract mathematics, natural or historic science, psychology, language, literature,he brought to any conceivable region of human knowledge an apparently equal capacity of understanding and acquiring. Had he brought to all an equal interest, it might have been impossible for him ever to have narrowed his attention to the limits necessary

for practical accomplishment. But his passion for significant human truth overbore that for mere knowledge, and drew him always to the studies that bore most nearly on the spiritual life of man.

"Nailing this thesis on the golden gate

Of the new Mammon temples: that the souls-
The striving, praying, hoping human souls-
Alone on earth are valuable,"

he said in the remarkable alumni poem written when he was scarcely twenty-four years old and this creed of the boy remained always the watchword of the man.

The ardor with which he contended for it, won him sometimes a name for unpractical indifference to material interests as against spiritual, or for hostility toward science as against letters. Nothing was farther from the fact. He gave material considerations their due weight in all his reasoning, and he had a natural love for both the generalizations and minutiae of science. In those natural sciences that lie nearest the human, such as biology, his knowledge was very considerable. Nor was he in the least a smatterer or dilettant in his varied knowledges: whatever he knew, he knew earnestly and thoroughly, penetrating with a trained insight to the foundation principles of a subject, and making himself honestly competent at least to comprehend intelligently what its specialists said, and appreciate its bearings on his own subject. So shy of asserting himself off his own ground was he, that those who knew him were generally quite unaware of the extent and variety of his knowledge. Again, though he consistently protested against neglect of the acquisitions of the past, no one kept more constantly abreast of the intellectual activities of the day. In whatever distant village, the currents of the world's thought-in letters, in science, in statecraft-flowed through his study.

Whatever entered his mind entered not as a dead acquisition, to lie stored away, but entered vitally into his whole self. Thus all his varied mental possessions deepened