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 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.

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.

Mr. Harte died suddenly at Camberley, England, May 6, 1902.

I. NATIONAL

JOHN BURNS OF GETTYSBURG

 
     Have you heard the story that gossips tell
     Of Burns of Gettysburg?—No?  Ah, well:
     Brief is the glory that hero earns,
     Briefer the story of poor John Burns.
     He was the fellow who won renown,—
     The only man who didn't back down
     When the rebels rode through his native town;
     But held his own in the fight next day,
     When all his townsfolk ran away.
     That was in July sixty-three,
     The very day that General Lee,
     Flower of Southern chivalry,
     Baffled and beaten, backward reeled
     From a stubborn Meade and a barren field.
 
 
     I might tell how but the day before
     John Burns stood at his cottage door,
     Looking down the village street,
     Where, in the shade of his peaceful vine,
     He heard the low of his gathered kine,
     And felt their breath with incense sweet;
     Or I might say, when the sunset burned
     The old farm gable, he thought it turned
     The milk that fell like a babbling flood
     Into the milk-pail red as blood!
     Or how he fancied the hum of bees
     Were bullets buzzing among the trees.
     But all such fanciful thoughts as these
     Were strange to a practical man like Burns,
     Who minded only his own concerns,
     Troubled no more by fancies fine
     Than one of his calm-eyed, long-tailed kine,—
     Quite old-fashioned and matter-of-fact,
     Slow to argue, but quick to act.
     That was the reason, as some folk say,
     He fought so well on that terrible day.
 
 
     And it was terrible.  On the right
     Raged for hours the heady fight,
     Thundered the battery's double bass,—
     Difficult music for men to face
     While on the left—where now the graves
     Undulate like the living waves
     That all that day unceasing swept
     Up to the pits the rebels kept—
     Round shot ploughed the upland glades,
     Sown with bullets, reaped with blades;
     Shattered fences here and there
     Tossed their splinters in the air;
     The very trees were stripped and bare;
     The barns that once held yellow grain
     Were heaped with harvests of the slain;
     The cattle bellowed on the plain,
     The turkeys screamed with might and main,
     And brooding barn-fowl left their rest
     With strange shells bursting in each nest.
 
 
     Just where the tide of battle turns,
     Erect and lonely stood old John Burns.
     How do you think the man was dressed?
     He wore an ancient long buff vest,
     Yellow as saffron,—but his best;
     And buttoned over his manly breast
     Was a bright blue coat, with a rolling collar,
     And large gilt buttons,—size of a dollar,—
     With tails that the country-folk called "swaller."
     He wore a broad-brimmed, bell-crowned hat,
     White as the locks on which it sat.
     Never had such a sight been seen
     For forty years on the village green,
     Since old John Burns was a country beau,
     And went to the "quiltings" long ago.
 
 
     Close at his elbows all that day,
     Veterans of the Peninsula,
     Sunburnt and bearded, charged away;
     And striplings, downy of lip and chin,—
     Clerks that the Home Guard mustered in,—
     Glanced, as they passed, at the hat he wore,
     Then at the rifle his right hand bore,
     And hailed him, from out their youthful lore,
     With scraps of a slangy repertoire:
     "How are you, White Hat?"  "Put her through!"
     "Your head's level!" and "Bully for you!"
     Called him "Daddy,"—begged he'd disclose
     The name of the tailor who made his clothes,
     And what was the value he set on those;
     While Burns, unmindful of jeer and scoff,
     Stood there picking the rebels off,—
     With his long brown rifle and bell-crown hat,
     And the swallow-tails they were laughing at.
 
 
     'Twas but a moment, for that respect
     Which clothes all courage their voices checked;
     And something the wildest could understand
     Spake in the old man's strong right hand,
     And his corded throat, and the lurking frown
     Of his eyebrows under his old bell-crown;
     Until, as they gazed, there crept an awe
     Through the ranks in whispers, and some men saw,
     In the antique vestments and long white hair,
     The Past of the Nation in battle there;
     And some of the soldiers since declare
     That the gleam of his old white hat afar,
     Like the crested plume of the brave Navarre,
     That day was their oriflamme of war.
 
 
     So raged the battle.  You know the rest:
     How the rebels, beaten and backward pressed,
     Broke at the final charge and ran.
     At which John Burns—a practical man—
     Shouldered his rifle, unbent his brows,
     And then went back to his bees and cows.
 
 
     That is the story of old John Burns;
     This is the moral the reader learns:
     In fighting the battle, the question's whether
     You'll show a hat that's white, or a feather!