"
Bret Harte in a few words relates how these miners reared the child, how
they were unconsciously influenced by it, and how one day an expressman
rushed into an adjacent village saying:--
"They've a street up there in 'Roaring,' that would lay over any street
in Red Dog. They've got vines and flowers round their houses, and they
wash themselves twice a day."
He had, as we have seen, something of the remarkable technique of which Poe
was a master. The influence of Dickens, especially his sentimentalism, is
often apparent in Harte's work. Some have accused him of caricature or
exaggeration, but these terms, when applied to his best work, signify
little except the use of emphasis and selection, of which Homer and
Shakespeare freely availed themselves. The author of _The Luck of Roaring
Camp_, _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_, and _Tennessee's Partner_ seemed to
know almost instinctively what he must emphasize or neglect in order to
give his readers a vivid impression of the California argonauts. He mingles
humor and pathos, realism and idealism, in a masterly way. No other author
has had the necessary dramatic touch to endow those times with such a
powerful romantic appeal to our imagination.
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