Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.
Descriptive Poems: I. Personal: Great WritersDickens in Camp
Bret Harte (18361902)A
The river sang below;
The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting
Their minarets of snow.
The ruddy tints of health
On haggard face and form that drooped and fainted
In the fierce race for wealth;
A hoarded volume drew,
And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure,
To hear the tale anew;
And as the firelight fell,
He read aloud the book wherein the Master
Had writ of “Little Nell.”
Was youngest of them all,—
But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar
A silence seemed to fall:
Listened in every spray,
While the whole camp, with “Nell,” on English meadows
Wandered and lost their way.
As by some spell divine—
Their cares dropped from them like the needles shaken
From out the gusty pine.
And he who wrought that spell?—
Ah, towering pine and stately Kentish spire,
Ye have one tale to tell!
Blend with the breath that thrills
With hop-vines’ incense all the pensive glory
That fills the Kentish hills.
And laurel wreathes intwine,
Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly,—
This spray of Western pine.