, from the beginning of the year, even unto the end of the year.'
Sometimes it has even seemed to me that heaven itself can scarcely be
more beautiful."

It was Sir James Clark who discovered the Undercliff to the public. Up
to the time of the publication of his work _On the Influence of Climate
in the Prevention and Cure of Disease_, only a few fishermen's huts
marked the spot that is now populous Ventnor. But the sheltered, sunny
spot, the soft air, the plants flourishing even in winter, the charming
surroundings, at once caught the fancy of invalids: they came in
numbers, both for a summer visit and a winter residence, and of course
suitable accommodation had to be provided for them. The "plague of
building" lighted on Ventnor: almost every possible and impossible spot
has been used for lodging--houses, hotels, shops, villas, churches,
situated with utter disregard to the natural lines of the place. The
building still goes on. There are everywhere ugly scars in the
chalk-banks that Nature has not had time to heal: in short, Ventnor is
spoiled for those who remember it in its early days, and for
aristocratic dwellers roundabout, but it is a case of the greatest good
to the greatest number; and when the quick-springing green shall have
kindly softened and folded in the crowded, incongruous buildings, and
blended into rounded masses above them, Ventnor will be forgiven its
railway that has made this region accessible to the many-headed, in
consideration of the comforts and amenities of life brought to the doors
of circumjacent dwellers, instead of being, as once, lacking, or brought
laboriously from London at serious individual expense.

To say that Ventnor is dull, to American notions, is only to say that it
is an English sea-side resort. People live mostly in lodgings, which is
the most unsocial way possible of living: there are no reading-rooms, no
cafes, no hops, no places of meeting and introduction. There is the
rapprochement of proximity on the Esplanade and the bathing beach, where
one gets a little of his fellow-creatures in a sort of spiritual
endosmose and exosmose. But nothing more, and I am afraid our average
youthful American specimen of Solomon's lilies would, at the end of two
days, cause all her crisp, snowy and varicolored petals to be refolded
within their calyx "ark," and indignantly withdraw herself for evermore
from the "Fair Island." "Her own loss?" Doubtless, but it is the race's
as well that an