the half ring of quiet-colored, placid sea--the emerald
sea, rough with white caps; the blue sea, sparkling in sunshine; the
moonlit sea, silver-gleaming, but melancholy, and terrible as eternity.

At Bonchurch lived the parents of the poet Swinburne, but they left some
years since, because, it is affirmed, there was no church hereabouts
sufficiently ritualistic to content their consciences. One cannot help
thinking, with a little unmalicious amusement, what a cuckoo child the
poet must have been to this pair. Here, too, lived a good old man and
prolix poet, a friend of Tennyson. It is asserted, on authority, that
the laureate, in his visits to the family, sometimes found himself so
intolerably bored by his fellow-craftsman that he was fain to betake
himself to a bathing-machine, dallying therein and over his bath for two
or three hours to purchase the necessary respite.

Beyond Bonchurch are three lions--"the Landslip" and the Luccombe and
Shanklin Chines. Many and many a rocky hillside pasture in New England
is far finer than the Landslip, and the Chines (fissures or ravines--"He
that in his day did chine the long-ribb'd Apennine," sings Dryden) are
by no means impressive to American eyes. But the mixture of miniature
wildernesses, tumbled rocks, stream, waterfall, airy little swells and
falls of ground, elegant villas, charming walks where all is beautiful,
finished, dainty, with incessant views of the really grand features of
the scene--the sea and the down--forms an enchanting combination. The
authoress who under the _nom-de-plume_ "Holme Lee" has done so much for
the readers of circulating libraries, resides at Shanklin, and here in
1819 came Keats and tarried while writing _Lamia_.

From Ventnor south-west through the Undercliff to St. Catherine's Hill,
the western bulwark of the Elysium of suave airs, the scenery is perhaps
even finer to Western hemisphere taste than that of the more noted
northern region. It is, if not wilder, more solitary, unimproved by art,
less pervaded with tourists and tourists' needs: one feels less
suffocated, crowded, and very, very covetous of one or another of the
lovely, lonely homes scattered here and there.

On this side of Ventnor is situated the National Consumptive Hospital
projected by Dr. Arthur Hill Hassall. It is on the cottage plan. There
are to be sixteen cottages, each to contain about six patients. Several
of the buildings are already completed and in use. The hospit