CALIFORNIA

BY
INA COOLBRITH

SAN FRANCISCO
THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA
MDCCCCXVIII

500 COPIES PRINTED BY
JOHN HENRY NASH, SAN FRANCISCO
DECORATIONS BY LAWRENCE B. HASTE
PORTRAIT BY DAN SWEENEY

INTRODUCTION

I have always believed that the Poet of the New World—of the World—was to come out of the West—from California. Why not? Would it be more strange that this broad land by the shores of the vast Pacific should produce the Supreme Singer, than that a little Island of the far Atlantic should have given birth to the Bard of Avon—to that kinglier brow than ever wore a crown?

For California is a Poem! The land of romance, of mystery, of worship, of beauty and of Song. It chants from her snow-crested, cloud-bannered mountain-ranges; it hymns thro' her forests of sky-reaching pine and sequoia; it ripples in her flowered and fruited valleys; it thunders from her fountains pouring, as it were, from the very waters above the firmament; it anthems from the deeps of the mightiest ocean of the world; and echoes ever in the syllables of her own strangely beautiful name,—California.

The spell of enchantment which she wove about me from the day when—a little child—I entered her borders thro' the rocky mountain-pass from the long trail across the great plains, was not lessened by the after-vision of the Southland grape and fig, orange and pomegranate,—or the (so-called) deserts of sand and cacti, which the spring months covered with a carpet of bloom rivalling the richest dyes of the Persian looms. Rather has it increased with the passing of time.