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With this distinctively American humour Bret Harte had little or nothing in common. The wild, sky-breaking humour of America has its fine qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two qualities, not only of supreme importance to life and letters, but of supreme importance to humour reverence and sympathy.
This partial and somewhat conventional foreign conception of American humour is admirably descriptive of the cumulative and "sky-breaking" humour of the early Mark Twain. Then no exaggeration was too absurd for him, no phantasm too unreal, no climax too extreme. The humour of that day was the humour bred of a barbaric freedom and a lawless, untrammelled life.
The wild, sky-breaking humor of America has its fine qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two qualities reverence and sympathy and these two qualities were knit into the closest texture of Bret Harte's humor." At this time Harte lived a quiet domestic life. He wrote steadily. He loved to write, but he was also obliged to.
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