"With high face held to the ultimate sea."
By EDWIN MARKHAM
If Xenophon had journeyed westward from Athens, pressing beyond the amber caverns of the Baltic, beyond the tin mines of Thule, out past the Gates of Hercules, exactly west, across an ocean and a continent, the next thalatta of his men would have saluted the Pacific at the Golden Gate from the low, shifting sand-hills of the unrisen San Francisco. For the violet-veiled city of Athene and the gray-draped city of St. Francis are in one line of latitude.
San Francisco crowns the extremity of a long, rugged peninsula, a little north of the centre of California,
"The land that has the tiger's length, The tawny tiger's length of arm,"
the land that stretches from pine to palm,
"Haunch in the cloud-rack, paw in the purring sea."
The one break in the mountain wall of the California Coast Range is the Golden Gate, the watery pass that leads from San Francisco to the Pacific. Spurs and peaks and cross ridges of this mountain chain would at long range seem to encompass the city round about; but, on nearer view, the edging waters on three sides make her distinctly a city of the sea.
Looking from the bay, past the fortified islands of the city, one may see San Francisco to the west, rising in airy beauty on clustered gray hills. At night the city hangs against the horizon like a lower sky, pulsing with starry lamps. By day it stretches in profile long and undulating, with spires and domes climbing up the steeps from a shore lined with the shipping of every nation—felucca, ironclad, merchantman, junk, together with bevies of tiny busybody craft, all of them circled and followed by slow-swinging gulls.