Bret Harte is probably as valuable a witness as could be summoned in this case. His touch is realistic, and yet his imagination is poetic and romantic. He has discovered something. He has done something both new and good. Within the space of some fifty pages, he has painted a series of pictures which will last as long as anything in the fifty thousand pages of Dickens. Taking "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" as perhaps the most nearly perfect of the tales, as well as the most truly representative of the writer's powers, let us try to guess its secret. In the first place, it is very short,--a single episode, succinctly and eloquently told. The descriptions of scenery and persons are masterly and memorable. The characters of these persons, their actions, and the circumstances of their lives, are as rugged, as grotesque, as terrible, and also as beautiful, as the scenery. Thus an artistic harmony is established,--the thing which is lacking in so much of our literature. The story moves swiftly on, through humor, pathos, and tragedy, to its dramatic close. It is given with perfect literary taste, and naught in its phases of human nature is either extenuated or set down in malice. The little narrative can be read in a few minutes, and can never be forgotten. But it is only an episode; and it is an episode of an episode,--that of the Californian gold-fever. The story of the Argonauts is only one story, after all, and these tales of Harte's are but so many facets of the same gem. They are not, however, like chapters in a romance; there is no such vital connection between them as develops a cumulative force. We are no more impressed after reading half a dozen of them than after the first; they are variations of the same theme. They discover to us no new truth about human nature; they only show us certain human beings so placed as to act out their naked selves,--to be neither influenced nor protected by the rewards and screens of conventional civilization. The affectation and insincerity of our daily life make such a spectacle fresh and pleasing to us. But we enjoy it because of its unexpectedness, its separateness, its unlikeness to the ordinary course of existence. It is like a huge, strange, gorgeous flower, an exaggeration and intensification of such flowers as we know; but a flower without roots, unique, never to be reproduced. It is fitting that its portrait should be painted; but, once done, it is done with; we cannot fill our picture-gallery with it. Carlyle wrote the History of the French Revolution, and Bret Harte has written the History of the Argonauts; but it is absurd to suppose that a national literature could be founded on either episode.