His characters are exceptions and his situations are theatric, yet for all that he cannot be ignored. He caught the spirit of the early mining camps and with it the romantic atmosphere of the old Spanish Colonial civilization that was swept away by the Anglo-Saxon rush for gold. His name cannot fail to go down with the era he recorded, and to identify oneself forever with an era, even though that era be a brief and restricted one, is no small achievement. He is the writer of the epic of the gold rush of the middle century in America, and whatever the quality of that epic may be, it can never be forgotten. He said in 1868: It may not have been an heroic era; it may have been a hard, ugly, unworked, vulgar and lawless era; but of such are heroes and aristocracies born. Three hundred years, and what a glamor shall hang about it!... A thousand years, and a new Virgil sings the American Æneid with the episode of Jason and the California golden fleece, and the historians tell us it is a myth! Laugh, my pioneer friends, but your great-great-great-great-grandchildren shall weep reverential tears. History, as was said of martyrdom, is "mean in the making" but how heroic it becomes in the perspective of five centuries![48] And in many ways his work is really of epic strength. He dealt with elemental men, often with veritable demigods, as Yuba Bill. His canvases are as broad as those even of Mark Twain. His human drama is played before a truly Western background. While Tennessee is being tried for his life, "Above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter passionless stars." At moments of crisis the narrative always moves with power. The wolves and the fire in the story _In the Carquinez Woods_ are intensely vivid and lurid in their presentation. The ride from Simpson's Bar is told with the graphic thrill of an eye-witness, and the description of the snow-storm at the opening of _Gabriel Conroy_ reminds one of Thomas Hardy. VI Finally, Harte was the parent of the modern form of the short story. It was he who started Kipling and Cable and Thomas Nelson Page. Few indeed have surpassed him in the mechanics of this most difficult of arts. According to his own belief, the form is an American product. We can do no better than to quote from his essay on _The Rise of the Short Story_. It traces the evolution of a peculiarly American addition to literature.