h, beautiful and severe: it would take a pair of stout New England
lungs to breathe enjoyably in such an air. That is the northern coast.
Mr. William Richards gives us the southern--the landscape, in fact,
of Atlantic City. In his scenes we have the infinitude of soft silver
beach, the rolling tumultuousness of a boundless sea, and twisted
cedars mounted like toiling ships on the crests of undulating
sand-hills. It is the charm, the dream, the power and the peace of the
Desert.

And here let us be indulged with a few words about a section of our
great continent which has never been sung in rhyme, and which it
is almost a matter of course to treat disparagingly. A cheap and
threadbare popular joke assigns the Delaware River as the eastern
boundary of the United States of America, and defines the out-landers
whose homes lie between that current and the Atlantic Ocean as
foreigners, Iberians, and we know not what. Scarcely more of an exile
was Victor Hugo, sitting on the shores of Old Jersey, than is the
denizen of _New_ Jersey when he brings his half-sailor costume and his
beach-learned manners into contrast with the thrift and hardness of
the neighboring commonwealth. The native of the alluvium is another
being from the native of the great mineral State. But, by the very
reason of this difference, there is a strange soft charm that comes
over our thoughts of the younger Jersey when we have done laughing
at it. That broad, pale peninsula, built of shells and crystal-dust,
which droops toward the south like some vast tropical leaf, and
spreads its two edges toward the fresh and salt waters, enervated with
drought and sunshine--that flat leaf of land has characteristics that
are almost Oriental. To make it the sea heaved up her breast, and
showed the whitened sides against which her tides were beating. To
walk upon it is in a sense to walk upon the bottom of the ocean. Here
are strange marls, the relics of infinite animal life, into which
has sunk the lizard or the dragon of antiquity--the gigantic
_Hadrosaurus_, who cranes his snaky throat at us in the museum,
swelling with the tale of immemorial times when he weltered here in
the sunny ooze. The country is a mighty steppe, but not deprived of
trees: the ilex clothes it with its set, dark foliage, and the endless
woods of pine, sand-planted, strew over that boundless beach a murmur
like the sea. The edibles it bears are of the quaintest and most
individual kinds: the cran