From Washington he writes: "Thank you, dear Nan, for your kind, hopeful letter. I have been very sick, very much disappointed; but I am better now and am only waiting for money to return. Can you wonder that I have kept this from you? You have so hard a time of it there, that I cannot bear to have you worried if there is the least hope of a change in my affairs. God bless you and keep you and the children safe, for the sake of Frank."
No one can read these letters without feeling that they mirror the real man, refined of feeling, kindly and humorous, but not strong of courage, oppressed by obligations, and burdened by doubts of how he was to care for those he loved. With all his talent he could not command independence, and the lot of the man who earns less than it costs to live is hard to bear.
Harte had the faculty of making friends, even if by neglect he sometimes lost them, and they came to his rescue in this trying time. Charles A. Dana and others secured for him an appointment by President Hayes as Commercial Agent at Crefeld, Prussia. In June, 1878, he sailed for England, leaving his family at Sea Cliff, Long Island, little supposing that he would never see them or America again.
On the day he reached Crefeld he wrote his wife in a homesick and almost despondent strain: "I am to all appearance utterly friendless; I have not received the first act of kindness or courtesy from anyone. I think things must be better soon. I shall, please God, make some good friends in good time, and will try and be patient. But I shall not think of sending for you until I see clearly that I can stay myself. If worst comes to worst I shall try to stand it for a year, and save enough to come home and begin anew there. But I could not stand it to see you break your heart here through disappointment as I mayhap may do."
Here is the artistic, impressionable temperament, easily disheartened, with little self-reliant courage or grit. But he seems to have felt a little ashamed of his plaint, for at midnight of the same day he wrote a second letter, half apologetic and much more hopeful, just because one or two people had been a little kind and he had been taken out to a fest.
Soon after, he wrote a letter to his younger son, then a small boy. It told of a pleasant drive to the Rhine, a few miles away. He concludes: "It was all very wonderful, but Papa thought after all he was glad his boys live in a country that is as yet pure and sweet and good—not in one where every field seems to cry out with the remembrance of bloodshed and wrong, and where so many people have lived and suffered that tonight, under this clear moon, their very ghosts seemed to throng the road and dispute our right of way. Be thankful, my dear boy, that you are an American. Papa was never so fond of his country before as in this land that has been so great, powerful, and so very hard and wicked."
In May, 1880, he was made Consul at Glasgow, a position that he filled for five years. During this period he spent a considerable part of his time in London and in visiting at country homes. He lectured and wrote and made many friends, among the most valued of whom were William Black and Walter Besant.
A new administration came in with 1885 and Harte was superseded. He went to London and settled down to a simple and regular life. For ten years he lived with the Van de Veldes, friends of long standing. He wrote with regularity and published several volumes of stories and sketches. In 1885 Harte visited Switzerland. Of the Alps he wrote: "In spite of their pictorial composition I wouldn't give a mile of the dear old Sierras, with their honesty, sincerity, and magnificent uncouthness, for a hundred thousand kilometers of the picturesque Vaud."
Of Geneva he wrote: "I thought I should not like it, fancying it a kind of continental Boston, and that the shadow of John Calvin and the old reformers, or still worse the sentimental idiocy of Rousseau and the De Staels, still lingered." But he did like it, and wrote brilliantly of Lake Leman and Mont Blanc.
Returning to his home in Aldershot he resumed work, giving some time to a libretto for a musical comedy, but his health was failing and he accomplished little. A surgical operation for cancer of the throat in March, 1902, afforded a little relief, but he worked with difficulty. On April 17th he began a new story, "A Friend of Colonel Starbottle." He wrote one sentence and began another; but the second sentence was his last work, though a few letters to friends bear a later date. On May 5th, sitting at his desk, there came a hemorrhage of the throat, followed later in the day by a second, which left him unconscious. Before the end of the day he peacefully breathed his last.