her, without grief or pain,
from the earth she loves, yet whose grosser paths her light steps only
touched to show the track through them to heaven. This is genuine art,
and such as all cannot fail to recognize who read the book in a right
sympathy with the conception that pervades it. Nor, great as the
discomfort was of reading it in brief weekly snatches, can I be wholly
certain that the discomfort of so writing it involved nothing but
disadvantage. With so much in every portion to do, and so little space
to do it in, the opportunities to a writer for mere self-indulgence were
necessarily rare.

Of the innumerable tributes the story has received, and to none other by
Dickens have more or more various been paid, there is one, the very
last, which has much affected me. Not many months before my friend's
death, he had sent me two _Overland Monthlies_ containing two sketches
by a young American writer far away in California, "The Luck of Roaring
Camp," and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," in which he had found such
subtle strokes of character as he had not anywhere else in late years
discovered; the manner resembling himself, but the matter fresh to a
degree that had surprised him; the painting in all respects masterly,
and the wild rude thing painted a quite wonderful reality. I have
rarely known him more honestly moved. A few months passed;
telegraph-wires flashed over the world that he had passed away on the
9th of June; and the young writer of whom he had then written to me, all
unconscious of that praise, put his tribute of gratefulness and sorrow
into the form of a poem called _Dickens in Camp_.[30] 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 Californian wilds, can restore outlawed "roaring camps" 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.

"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