Bret Harte
Bret Harte
Francis Bret Hartewas an American short story writer and poet, best remembered for his short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, fiction, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern U.S. to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been most...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 August 1836
CityAlbany, NY
CountryUnited States of America
But, when the goddess' work is done,The woman's still remains.
Hark! I hear the tramp of thousands, And of armèd men the hum; Lo, a nation's hosts have gathered Round the quick alarming drum Saying, Come, Freemen, Come! Ere your heritage be wasted, Said the quick alarming drum.
Each lost day has its patron saint!
Don't be too quickTo break bad habits: better stick,Like the Mission folk, to your arsenic.
There is peace in the swamp, though the quiet is Death
If, of all words of tongue and pen, The saddest are, It might have been,' More sad are these we daily see: 'It is, but hadn't ought to be!'
But still when the mists of doubt prevail, And we lie becalmed by the shores of age, We hear from the misty troubled shore The voce of children gone before. Drawing the soul to its anchorage.
For the glory born of Goodness Never dies, And its flag is not half-masted In the skies.
Perhaps there is no gift of nature that requires as little exertion on the part of the owner as personal beauty. I am not certain but that it is this very absence of effort which excites our admiration.
We begin to die as soon as we are born, and the end is linked to the beginning.
A bird in the hand is a certainty, but a bird in the bush may sing.
The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.
The creator who could put a cancer in a believer's stomach is above being interfered with by prayers.
Besides writing, I have been teaching myself to 'develop' my own photographic plates, and I haven't a stick of clothing or an exposed finger that isn't stained. I sit for hours in a dark-room feeling as if I were a very elderly Faust at some dreadful incantation, and come out of it, blinding at the light, like a Bastille prisoner. And yet I am not successful!