THE ISLE OF WIGHT. 327 



body of water is an element, much more than we are often aware. 

 So it is that the impatient first glance of the young traveler, or 

 the impertinent critical stare of the old tourist, is almost never 

 satisfied, if the honest truth be admitted, in what it has been led 

 to previously imagine. I hare heard "Niagra is a mill-dam," 

 "Rome is a humbug." 



The deep sentiments of Nature that we sometimes seem to 

 have been made confident of, when among the mountains, or on 

 the moors or the ocean even those of man wrought out in archi- 

 tecture and sculpture and painting, or of man working in unison 

 with Nature, as sometimes in the English parks, on the Rhine, 

 and here on the Isle of Wight such revealings are beyond 

 words ; they never could be transcribed into note-books and dia- 

 ries, and so descriptions of them become caricatures, and when 

 we see them, we at first say we are disappointed that we find 

 not the monsters we were told of. 



The greater part of the Isle of Wight is more dreary, desolate, 

 bare and monotonous, than any equal extent of land you prob- 

 ably ever saw in America would be, rather, if it were not that 

 you are rarely out of sight of the sea ; and no landscape, of which 

 that is a part, ever can be without variety and ever-changing in- 

 terest. It is, in fact, down-land, in the interior, exactly like that 

 I described in Wiltshire, and sometimes breaking down into 

 such bright dells as I there told of. But on the south shore it is 

 rocky, craggy ; and after you have walked through a rather dull 

 country, though pleasing on the whole, for hours after landing, 

 you come gradually to where the majesty of vastness, peculiar to 

 the downs and the ocean, alternates or mingles with dark, pictur- 

 esque, rugged ravines, chasms and water-gaps, grand rocks, 

 and soft, warm, smiling, inviting dells and dingles ; and, withal, 

 there is a strange and fascinating enrichment of foliage, more 

 deep, graceful and luxuriant, than I ever saw before. All this 



