He fulfilled his end of the deal finally though he was often late in submitting articles and his publisher William Dean Howells was not impressed. And his readers were turning elsewhere. After moving to his native New York to write freelance, his novel Gabriel Conroy (1876) and his collaboration with Mark Twain on the play Ah Sin (1878) proved unsuccessful in providing adequate income for the Harte family. He and Twain quarrelled bitterly amid rumours of his belligerence, spendthrift habits, drinking, and womanising which would haunt him for years to come. Harte had mastered the genre of gold rush fiction, capturing the corruption and greed in nostalgic prose, with vivid descriptions of the myriad characters he had known and the wild new frontier lands he had traversed. However he would never quite maintain the impetus of his first published successes. His financial stresses took a turn for the better when in 1878 he was
But that I know love is begun by time; And that I see, in passages of proof, Time qualifies the spark and fire of it. There lives within the very flame of love A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it; And nothing is at a like goodness still; For goodness, growing to a plurisy, Dies in his own too much: that we would do We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes And hath abatements and delays as many As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents; And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh, That hurts by easing. But, to the quick o' the ulcer:— Hamlet comes back: what would you undertake, To show yourself your father's son in deed More than in words? LAERTES To cut his throat i' the church. KING CLAUDIUS No place, indeed, should murder sanctuarize; Revenge should have no bounds. But, good Laertes, Will you do this, keep close within your chamber. Hamlet return'd shall know you are come home: We'll put on those shall praise your excellence
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