Complete Poetical Works | Page 3

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*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS
by
Bret Harte
"ARGONAUT EDITION" OF THE WORKS OF BRET HARTE,
VOL. 8
P. F. COLLIER & SON
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT 1882, 1896, AND 1902
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Although Bret Harte's name is identified with Californian life, it was
not till he was fifteen that the author of "Plain Language from Truthful
James" saw the country of his adoption. Francis Bret Harte, to give the
full name which he carried till he became famous, was born at Albany,
New York, August 25, 1839. He went with his widowed mother to
California in 1854, and was thrown as a young man into the hurly-burly
which he more than any other writer has made real to distant and later
people. He was by turns a miner, schoolteacher, express messenger,
printer, and journalist. The types
which live again in his pages are
thus not only what he observed, but what he himself impersonated in
his own experience.
He began trying his pen in The Golden Era of San Francisco, where he
was working as a compositor; and when The Californian, edited by
Charles Henry Webb, was started in 1864 as a literary newspaper, he
was one of a group of brilliant young fellows--Mark Twain, Charles

Warren Stoddard, Webb himself, and Prentice Mulford--who gave at
once a new interest in California beside what mining and agriculture
caused. Here in an early number appeared "The Ballad of the Emeu,"
and he contributed many poems, grave and gay, as well as prose in a
great variety of form. At the same time he was appointed Secretary of
the United States Branch Mint at San Francisco, holding the office till
1870.
But Bret Harte's great opportunity came when The Overland Monthly
was established in 1868 by Anton Roman. This magazine was the
outgrowth of the racy, exuberant literary spirit which had already found
free expression in the journals named. An eager ambition to lift all the
new life of the Pacific into a recognized place in the world of letters
made the young men we have named put their wits together in a
monthly magazine which should rival the Atlantic in Boston and
Blackwood in Edinburgh. The name was easily had, and for a sign
manual on the cover some one drew a grizzly bear, that formidable
exemplar of Californian wildness. But the design did not quite satisfy,
until Bret Harte, with a felicitous stroke, drew two parallel lines just
before the feet of the halting brute. Now it was the grizzly of the
wilderness drawing back before the railway of civilization, and the
picture was complete as an emblem.
Bret Harte became, by the common urgency of his companions, the
first editor of the Overland, and at once his own tales and poems began,
and in the second number appeared "The Luck of Roaring Camp,"
which instantly brought him wide fame. In a few months he found
himself besought for poems and articles, sketches and stories, in
influential magazines, and in 1871 he turned away from the Pacific
coast, and took up his residence, first in New York, afterward in
Boston.
"No one," says his old friend, Mr. Stoddard, "who knows Mr. Harte,
and knew the California of his day, wonders that he left it as he did.
Eastern editors were crying for his work. Cities vied with one another
in the offer of tempting bait. When he turned his back on San Francisco,
and started for Boston, he began a tour that the greatest author of any

age might have been proud of. It was a veritable ovation that swelled
from sea to sea: the classic sheep was sacrificed all along the route. I
have often thought that if Bret Harte had met with a fatal accident
during that transcontinental journey, the world would have declared
with one voice that the greatest genius of his time was lost to it."
In Boston he entered into an arrangement with the predecessors of the
publishers of this volume, and his contributions appeared in their
periodicals and were gathered into volumes. The arrangement in one
form or another continued to the time of his death, and has for witness
a stately array of comely volumes; but the prose has far outstripped the
poetry. There are few writers of Mr. Harte's prodigality of nature who
have used with so much fine reserve their faculty for melodious verse,
and the present volume contains the entire body of his poetical work,
growing by minute accretions during thirty odd years.