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When word of the passing of “The Master,” as he reverently styled him, reached Bret Harte he was in San Rafael. He immediately sent a dispatch across the bay to San Francisco to hold back the forthcoming publication of his “Overland Monthly” for twenty-four hours, and ere that time had elapsed the poetic tribute to which the title was given of “Dickens in Camp” had been composed and sent on its way to magazine headquarters in the Western metropolis. That was in July, 1870.

Late in the ’70s, while on his way to a consulship in Germany, Bret Harte visited London for the first time. There he was taken in charge by Joaquin Miller, the Poet of the Sierras, who in his reminiscences relates: “He could not rest until he stood by the grave of Dickens. At last one twilight I led him by the hand to where some plain letters in a broad, flat stone just below the bust of Thackeray read ‘Charles Dickens.’ Bret Harte is dead now and it will not hurt him in politics, where they seem to want the hard and heartless for high places, it will not hurt him in politics nor in anything anywhere to tell the plain truth, how he tried to speak but choked up, how tears ran down and fell on the stone as he bowed his bare head very low, how his hand trembled as I led him away.”

Many years later, in May, 1890, Bret Harte, in response to a request for a facsimile of the original manuscript of “Dickens in Camp” replied in part:

“I hurriedly sent the first and only draft of the verses to the office at San Francisco, and I suppose after passing the printer’s and proof-reader’s hands it lapsed into the usual oblivion of all editorial ‘copy’.

“I remember that it was very hastily but very honestly written, and it is fair to add that it was not until later that I knew for the first time that those gentle and wonderful eyes, which I was thinking of as being closed forever, had ever rested kindly upon a line of mine.”

The poem itself breathes reverence for “The Master” throughout. To residents of California, who revel in the outdoor life of her mountains & valleys, the poem has a particular attraction for its camp-fire spirit which to us seems part and parcel of that outdoor life. It is a far cry, perhaps, from the camp-fires of 1849 to the camp-fires of 1922, but surely the camp-fire spirit is the same with us in our Western wonderland today as it was with those rough old miners who sat around the logs under the pines after a day of arduous and oft disappointing toil. Surely the visions we see, the lessons we read in the camp-fire glow, are much the same as they were then. Surely we build the same castles in the air, draw the same inspirations from it. Biographer Forster pays the poem this tribute:

“It embodies the same kind of incident which had so affected the master himself in the papers to which I have referred; it shows the gentler influences which, in even those California wilds, can restore outlawed ‘roaring campers’ to silence and humanity; and there is hardly any form of posthumous tribute which I can imagine likely to have better satisfied his desire of fame than one which should thus connect with the special favorite among all his heroines the restraints and authority exerted by his genius over the rudest and least civilized of competitors in that far, fierce race for wealth.”

In the twining of English holly and Western pine upon the great English novelist’s grave the poet expresses a happy thought. He calls East and West together in common appreciation of one whose influence was not merely local but worldwide. He invites the old world and the new to kneel together at the altar of sentiment, an appeal to the emotions which never fails to touch a responsive chord in the heart of humanity.

Frederick S. Myrtle

San Francisco, California
April, 1922

Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting,
The river sang below;
The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting
Their minarets of snow.

The roaring camp-fire, with rude humor, painted
The ruddy tints of health
On haggard face and form that drooped and fainted
In the fierce race for wealth;

Till one arose, and from his pack’s scant treasure
A hoarded volume drew,
And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure
To hear the tale anew;

And then, while round them shadows gathered faster,
And as the firelight fell,
He read aloud the book wherein the Master
Had writ of “Little Nell.”

Perhaps ’twas boyish fancy,–for the reader
Was youngest of them all,–
But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar
A silence seemed to fall;

The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows,
Listened in every spray,
While the whole camp, with “Nell” on English meadows,
Wandered and lost their way.

And so in mountain solitudes–o’ertaken
As by some spell divine–
Their cares dropped from them like the needles shaken
From out the gusty pine.

Lost is that camp, and wasted all its fire:
And he who wrought that spell?–
Ah, towering pine and stately Kentish spire,
Ye have one tale to tell!

Lost is that camp! but let its fragrant story
Blend with the breath that thrills
With hop-vines’ incense all the pensive glory
That fills the Kentish hills.

And on that grave where English oak and holly
And laurel wreaths intwine,
Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly,–
This spray of Western pine!

July, 1870.