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Updated: May 11, 2025
Shades of Bret Harte, true child of genius, what a pity you ever forsook these scenes to dwindle in the foreign air of the Atlantic coast! A whispering pine of the Sierras transplanted to Fifth Avenue! How could it grow? Although it shows some faint signs of life, how sickly are the leaves! As for fruit, there is none. America had in Bret Harte its most distinctively national poet.
The sentimental attitude towards women and children, which is one of the most typical aspects of American idealism, is constantly illustrated in our short stories. Bret Harte, disciple of Dickens as he was, and Romantic as was his fashion of dressing up his miners and gamblers, was accurately faithful to the American feeling towards the "kid" and the "woman."
He removed to London where he remained, for most part, until his death. Bret Harte never really knew the life of the mining camp. His mining experiences were too fragmentary, and consequently his portraits of mining life are wholly impressionistic. "No one," Mark Twain wrote, "can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with pick and shovel and drill and fuse."
And the effect is inexpressively increased by the background and the whole picture which Bret Harte paints so powerfully; the stormy skies, the sombre gorge, the rocking and spinning coach, and high above the feverish passengers the huge dark form of Yuba Bill, a silent mountain of humour.
Through Starr King's interest, his parishioner Robert B. Swain, Superintendent of the Mint, had early in 1864 appointed Harte as his private secretary, at a salary of two hundred dollars a month, with duties that allowed considerable leisure. This was especially convenient, as a year or so before he had married, and additional income was indispensable.
If you have parts, you will never be at rest till you have brought yourself to a habit of speaking most gracefully; for I aver, that it is in your power You will desire Mr. Harte, that you may read aloud to him every day; and that he will interrupt and correct you every time that you read too fast, do not observe the proper stops, or lay a wrong emphasis.
She also found in prison opportunity to study English and its literature, and to familiarize herself with the great American writers. In Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson she found great treasures. She left Blackwell's Island in the month of August, 1894, a woman of twenty-five, developed and matured, and intellectually transformed.
For some time the good roads, fairly well watered, passed over level, fruitful country, with comfortable homes. Then came gently rolling land and soon the foothills, with gravelly soil and scattered pines. A few orchards and ranches were passed, but not much that was really attractive. Then we reached the scenes of early-day mining and half-deserted towns known to Bret Harte and the days of gold.
The Utica, Angel's and Lightner mines give employment to hundreds of men. In the afternoon I visited the Bret Harte Girls' High School. It is a very simple frame building, on the summit of a hill overlooking the town. The man who directed me how to find it, I discovered had not the remotest idea who Bret Harte might be; "John Brown" would have answered the purpose equally as well.
Brilliant as he was, Artemus Ward seemed most effective only when he spoke in weird vernacular through the grotesque mouthpiece of his own invention. Bret Harte sacrificed more and more of the native flavour of his genius in his progressive preoccupation with the more sophisticated refinements of the purely literary.
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