bubbles of greater and greater beauty
are being blown in these secluded places, and soon we hope to enrich
commerce with all the elegances of latticinio and schmelze, the
perfected glass of an American Venice.

But our business is not with the land, but the sea. Here it lies,
basking at our feet, the warm amethystine sea of the South. It does
not boom and thunder, as in the country of the "cold gray stones."
On the contrary, saturating itself with sunny ease, thinning its bulk
over the shoal flat beach with a succession of voluptuous curves, it
spreads thence in distance with strands and belts of varied color,
away and away, until blind with light it faints on a prodigiously far
horizon. Its falling noises are as soft as the sighs of Christabel.
Its colors are the pale and milky colors of the opal. But ah! what an
impression of boundlessness! How the silver ribbon of beach unrolls
for miles and miles! And landward, what a parallel sea of marshes,
bottoms and dunes! The sense of having all the kingdoms of the world
spread out beneath one, together with most of the kingdoms of the
mermen, has never so come to one's consciousness before. And again,
what an artist is Nature, with these faint washes and tenderest varied
hues--varied and tender as the flames from burning gases--while her
highest lights (a painter will understand the difficulty of _that_)
are still diaphanous and profound!

One goes to the seaside not for pomp and peacock's tails, but for
saltness, Nature and a bite of fresh fish. To build a city there that
shall not be an insult to the sentiment of the place is a matter of
difficulty. One's ideal, after all, is a canvas encampment. A range of
solid stone villas like those of Newport, so far as congruity with
a watering-place goes, pains the taste like a false note in music.
Atlantic City pauses halfway between the stone house and the tent, and
erects herself in woodwork. A quantity of bright, rather giddy-looking
structures, with much open-work and carved ruffling about the eaves
and balconies, are poised lightly on the sand, following the course
of the two main avenues which lead parallel with the shore, and the
series of short, straight, direct streets which leap across them and
run eagerly for the sea. They have a low, brooding look, and evidently
belong to a class of sybarites who are not fond of staircases. Among
them, the great rambling hotel, sprawling in its ungainly length here
and there, looks li