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.
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 vividness of the impressions made on
him by the experience of his early manhood when he partook of the
elixir vitae of California, and the stories which from year to year
flowed from an apparently inexhaustible fountain glittered with the
gold washed down from the mountain slopes of that country which
through his imagination he had made so peculiarly his own.
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