...
"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the
right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the
work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds...."
Absolute sincerity is the most striking quality in his masterpieces.
Simplicity and brevity are next in evidence; to these are sometimes added
the pathos and intensity of a Hebrew prophet.
BRET HARTE, 1839-1902
LIFE.--The father of Bret Harte was professor of Greek in the Albany, New
York, Female College, where his son, named Francis Bret, was born in 1839.
The boy never attended an institution of learning higher than a common
school. Fatherless at the age of fifteen, he went with his mother to
California in 1854. Here he tried teaching school, mining, going on stages
as an express messenger, printing, government service, and editing. Of his
experience in California, he writes:--
"Here I was thrown among the strangest social conditions that the
latter-day world has perhaps seen.... Amid rushing waters and wildwood
freedom, an army of strong men, in red shirts and top-boots, were
feverishly in search of the buried gold of earth.
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