A Bit of Picturesque Nevada City, Embracing the Homes of Its Leading
Citizens
Foreword
In California's imaginary Hall of Fame, Bret Harte must be accorded a
prominent, if not first place. His short stories and dialect poems
published fifty years ago made California well known the world over and
gave it a romantic interest conceded no other community. He saw the
picturesque and he made the world see it. His power is unaccountable if
we deny him genius. He was essentially an artist. His imagination gave
him vision, a new life in beautiful setting supplied colors and rare
literary skill painted the picture.
His capacity for absorption was marvelous. At the age of about twenty he
spent less than a year in the foot-hills of the Sierras, among pioneer
miners, and forty-five years of literary output did not exhaust his
impressions. He somewhere refers to an "eager absorption of the strange
life around me, and a photographic sensitiveness," to certain scenes and
incidents." "Eager absorption," "photographic sensitiveness," a rich
imagination and a fine literary style, largely due to his mother,
enabled him to win at his death this acknowledgment from the "London
Spectator:" "No writer of the present day has struck so powerful and
original a note as he has sounded."
Francis Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York, August 25, 1836. His
father was a teacher and translator; his mother a woman of high
character and cultivated tastes.
