Library of the best American literature: Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers
General
Library of the best American literature: Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers
American literature
From 1878 to 1885 Mr. Harte was United States Consul successively
to Crefield and Glasgow. Ferdinand Freiligraph, one of his German
translators, and himself a poet, pays this tribute to his peculiar
excellence:
“Nevertheless he remains what he is――the Californian and the
gold-digger. But the gold for which he has dug, and which he found, is
not the gold in the bed of rivers――not the gold in veins of mountains;
it is the gold of love, of goodness, of fidelity, of humanity, which
even in rude and wild hearts――even under the rubbish of vices and
sins――remains forever uneradicated from the human heart. That he
there searched for this gold, that he found it there and triumphantly
exhibited it to the world――that is his greatness and his merit.”
His works as published from 1867 to 1890 include “Condensed Novels,”
“Poems,” “The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches,” “East and
West Poems,” “Poetical Works,” “Mrs. Skaggs’ Husbands,” “Echoes of
the Foothills,” “Tales of the Argonauts,” “Gabriel Conroy,” “Two Men
of Sandy Bar,” “Thankful Blossom,” “Story of a Mine,” “Drift from
Two Shores,” “The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories,” “In
the Carquinez Woods,” “On the Frontier,” “By Shore and Ledge,”
“Snowbound at Eagles,” “The Crusade of the Excelsior,” “A Phyllis of
the Sierras.” One of Mr. Harte’s most popular late novels, entitled
“Three Partners; or, The Big Strike on Heavy Tree Hill,” was published
as a serial in 1897. Though written while the author was in Europe,
the vividness of the description and the accurate delineations of the
miner character are as strikingly real as if it had been produced by
the author while residing in the mining country of his former Western
home.
* * * * *
SOCIETY UPON THE STANISLAUS.
I reside at Table Mountain, and my name is Truthful James;
I am not up to small deceit or any sinful games;
And I’ll tell in simple language what I know about the row
That broke up our Society upon the Stanislow.
But first, I would remark, that it is not a proper plan
For any scientific gent to whale his fellow-man,
And, if a member don’t agree with his peculiar whim,
To lay for that same member for to “put a head” on him.
Now nothing could be finer or more beautiful to see
Than the first six months’ proceedings of that same Society,
Till Brown of Calaveras brought a lot of fossil bones
That he found within a tunnel near the tenement of Jones.
Then Brown, he read a paper, and he reconstructed there,
From those same bones, an animal that was extremely rare;
And Jones then asked the Chair for a suspension of the rules,
Till he could prove that those same bones was one of his lost
mules.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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