If we may trust Harte's own statement, made, it must be remembered, in the retrospect of later years, he set out deliberately to add a new province to American literature. During the period between 1862 and 1867, he wrote, according to his own statement, "_The Society upon the Stanislaus_ and _The Story of M'liss_--the first a dialectical poem, the second a California romance--his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish, but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility--a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better known pages of the _Overland Monthly_, he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, and the poem of _The Heathen Chinee_."[41]
But the poem and the romance were not his first efforts toward a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. His first vision of the literary possibilities of the region had been inspired by Irving, and he wrote in the _Sketch Book_ manner during the greater part of his seventeen years upon the Pacific Coast. Behind the California of the gold and the excitement lay three hundred years of an old Spanish civilization. What Irving had done for the Hudson why could he not do for the Mission lands and the Spanish occupation, "that glorious Indian summer of California history, around which so much poetical haze still lingers--that bland, indolent autumn of Spanish rule, so soon to be followed by the wintry storms of Mexican independence and the reviving springs of American conquest"?[42] It was a vision worthy of a Hawthorne. That it possessed him for years and was abandoned with reluctance is evident to one who examines his early work.
He voiced it in _The Angelus, Heard at the Mission Dolores, 1868_, in the same volume of the _Overland Monthly_ that contained _The Luck of Roaring Camp_:
Borne on the swell of your long waves receding, I touch the further Past-- I see the dying glow of Spanish glory, The sunset dream and last.
Before me rise the dome-shaped Mission towers; The white Presidio; The swart commander in his leathern jerkin, The priest in stole of snow.