POWELL STREET.
You start
From the town’s hot heart
To ride up Powell Street.
Hotel and theatre and crowding shops,
And Market’s cabled stream that never stops,
And the mixed hurrying beat
Of countless feet—
Take a front seat.
Before you rise
Six terraced hills, up to the low-hung skies;
Low where across the hill they seem to lie,
And then—how high!
Up you go slowly. To the right
A wide square, green and bright.
Above that green a broad façade,
Strongly and beautifully made,
In warm clear color standeth fair and true
Against the blue.
Only, above, two purple domes rise bold,
Twin-budded spires, bright-tipped with balls of gold.
Past that, and up you glide,
Up, up, till, either side,
Wide earth and water stretch around—away—
The straits, the hills, and the low-lying, wide-spread, dusky bay.
Great houses here,
Dull, opulent, severe.
Dives’ gold birds on guarding lamps a-wing—
Dead gold, that may not sing!
Fair on the other side
Smooth, steep-laid sweeps of turf and green boughs waving wide.
This is the hilltop’s crown.
Below you, down
In blurred, dim streets, the market quarter lies,
Foul, narrow, torn with cries
Of tortured things in cages, and the smell
Of daily bloodshed rising; that is hell.
But up here on the crown of Powell Street
The air is sweet;
And the green swaying mass of eucalyptus bends
Like hands of friends,
To gladden you despite the mansions’ frown.
Then you go down.
Down, down, and round the turns to lower grades;
Lower in all ways; darkening with the shades
Of poverty, old youth, and unearned age,
And that quick squalor which so blots the page
Of San Francisco’s beauty,—swift decay
Chasing the shallow grandeur of a day.
Here, like a noble lady of lost state,
Still calmly smiling at encroaching fate,
Amidst the squalor, rises Russian Hill,—
Proud, isolated, lonely, lovely still.
So on you glide.
Till the blue straits lie wide
Before you; purple mountains loom across,
And islands green as moss;
With soft white fog-wreaths drifting, drifting through
To comfort you;
And light, low-singing waves that tell you reach
The end,—North Beach.