Complete Poetical Works

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, school-teacher, 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
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Complete Poetical Works
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
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Complete Poetical Works
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.
In 1878 he was appointed United States Consul at Crefeld, Germany, and
after that date he resided, with little interruption, on the Continent
or in England. He was transferred to Glasgow in March, 1880, and
remained there until July, 1885. During the rest of his life he made
his home in London. His foreign residence is disclosed in a number of
prose sketches and tales and in one or two poems; but life abroad
never
dimmed the