fear lest the glory should mount too high, and lay its attractive hand
on my beloved. The fog has been dear to me ever since. I have often
grumbled at it when I was in it or under it, but when I have seen it
from above, that first thrill of wonder and delight has come back to me
- always. Whether on the Berkeley hills I see its irresistible columns
moving through the Golden Gate across the bay to take possession of the
land, or whether I stand on the height of Tamalpais and look at the
white, tangled flood below, -

"My heart leaps up when I behold."

It remains to me -

"A vision, a delight and a desire."

When the beauty of the fog first got hold of me, I wondered whether any
one had given literary expression to its supreme charm. I searched the
works of some of the better-known California poets, not quite without
result. I was familiar with what seem to me the best of the serious
verses of Bret Harte, the lines on San Francisco, - wherein the city is
pictured as a penitent Magdalen, cowled in the grey of the Franciscans,
- the soft pale grey of the sea fog. The literary value of the figure is
hardly injured by the cold fog that the penitence of this particular
Magdalen has never been of an enduring quality. It is to be noted that
what Harte speaks of is not the beauty of the fog, but its sobriety and
dignity.

Sill, with his susceptibility to the infinite variety of nature
and with the spark of the divine fire which burned in him, refers often
to some of the effects of the fog, such as the wonderful sunset colors