RELIEVING GUARD.
Came the relief. "What, sentry, ho!
How passed the night through thy long waking?"
"Cold, cheerless, dark as may befit
The hour before the dawn is breaking."
"No sight? no sound?" "No; nothing save
The plover from the marshes calling,
And in yon western sky, about
An hour ago, a star was falling."
"A star? There's nothing strange in that."
"No, nothing; but, above the thicket,
Somehow it seemed to me that God
Somewhere had just relieved a picket."
This is not only good poetry; it reveals deep and fine feeling.
Through Starr King's interest, his parishioner Robert B. Swain, Superintendent of the Mint, had early in 1864 appointed Harte as his private secretary, at a salary of two hundred dollars a month, with duties that allowed considerable leisure. This was especially convenient, as a year or so before he had married, and additional income was indispensable.
In May, 1864, Harte left the Golden Era, joining Charles Henry Webb and others in a new literary venture, the Californian. It was a brilliant weekly. Among the contributors were Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Prentice Mulford. Harte continued his delightful "Condensed Novels" and contributed poems, stories, sketches, and book reviews. "The Society on the Stanislaus," "John Brown of Gettysburg," and "The Pliocene Skull" belong to this period.
In the "Condensed Novels" Harte surpassed all parodists. With clever burlesque, there was both appreciation and subtle criticism. As Chesterton says, "Bret Harte's humor was sympathetic and analytical. The wild, sky-breaking humor of America has its fine qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two qualities—reverence and sympathy—and these two qualities were knit into the closest texture of Bret Harte's humor."