The scene of all Miss Dawson’s stories is San Francisco—her San Francisco—San Francisco as she sees it from her eyrie atop of “Russian Hill.” To her it is a dream city—a city of wraiths and things forbidden to the senses—of half-heard whispers from tombs of men long dead and damned—of winds that sing dirges, clouds that are signs and portents, fogs peopled with fantastic existences pranking like mad, as is the habit of all sea-folk on shore leave—a city where it is never morning, where the birds never sing, where children are unknown, and where at night the street-lights at the summits of the hills “flare as if out of the sky,” signaling mysterious messages from another world. In short, this sister to Hugo has breathed into the gross material San Francisco so strange a soul that to him who has read her book the name of the town must henceforth have a meaning that never before attached to any word of human speech. Wherefore I say of this book that it is a work of supreme genius; and I try to have faith to believe that whatever else may befall it, while the language in which it is written remains intelligible to men it will not fail to challenge the attention and engage the interest of the judicious.
To those who have feared the effect upon Miss Dawson’s powers of time, sorrow, privation and hope deferred, it is a joy to note that her latest and longest story, “A Gracious Visitation”—the one written especially for this volume, the others being from twenty to thirty years old—is the best. It is indeed a marvelous creation, and I know of nothing in literature having a sufficient resemblance to it to serve as a basis of comparison. In point of mere originality, I should say it is unsurpassed and unsurpassable; the ability to figure to oneself a story more novel and striking would, in a writer, imply the ability to write one—which I think the most capable writer would be slowest to claim. The best of the other stories is by no means the one that gives its title to the book. I shall not undertake to say which is best, but shall conclude by quoting the “envoy” of “The Ballade of the Sea of Sleep”;
Archangels, princes, thrones, dominions, powers,
Which of you dwarf the centuries to hours,
Or swell the moments into æons’ sweep?
Is it the Prince of Darkness, then, who cowers
Below the dream-waves of the Sea of Sleep?
1897.