These stories have all a good deal of the supernatural and very little of the natural. The lover of “realism” (who is sometimes pleased to call himself a “veritist”) may with great profit diligently let them alone; as may also the mere idler, who reads with a delinquent advertence, to pass the time. Miss Dawson is too true an artist to write for a slack attention: every page of her book is rich with significances underlying the narrative like gold in the bed of a stream. And this is especially true of the poems. Those poems, by the way—how came they there? Why is there a poet in every story, whose verses have nothing to do with the action of the piece, though always in harmony with its spirit? I think I know the secret of this irrelevant feature of the work, and a pathetic one it is: Miss Dawson puts her poetry into her prose because she can not get it published otherwise—the more shame to our schools and public. Not all her verse is as good as the prose that carries it. Some of it is ungrammatical, and two whole pages of one piece have only the finals “ain” and “aining”—an insupportable performance. Much of it lacks ease, fluency; but all is worth reading and reading again; and in the “Ballade of the Sea of Sleep” are an elevation and largeness that no living poet has excelled. 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.