wenty-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 t