The atmospheric tone, the exquisite, rich simplicity of the landscape, gave mild, enchanting sense of positive climate—these are the real charm of Newport, and the secret of her supremacy. You are melted by the admirable art of the landscape, by seeing so much that is lovely and impressive achieved with such a masterly frugality of means—with so little parade of the vast, the various, or the rare, with so narrow a range of color and form. I could not help thinking, as I turned from the great harmony of elegance and the unfathomable mystery of purity which lay deepening on the breast of nature with the various shades of twilight, to the motley discord and lavish wholesale splendor of the flowing stream of gentility on the Avenue, that, quite in their own line of effect, these money-made social heroes and heroines might learn a few good lessons from the daily prospect of the great western expanse of rock and ocean in its relations with the declining sun. But this is a rather fantastic demand. Many persons of course come to Newport simply because others come, and in this way the present brilliant colony has grown up. Let me not be suspected, when I speak of Newport, of the untasteful heresy of meaning primarily rocks and waves rather than ladies and gentlemen.

The ladies and gentlemen are in great force—the ladies, of course, especially. It is true everywhere, I suppose, that women are the central animating element of “society”; but you feel this to be especially true as you pass along the Newport Avenue. I doubt whether anywhere else women enjoy so largely what is called a “good time” with so small a sacrifice, that is, of the luxury of self-respect. I heard a lady yesterday tell another, with a quiet ecstasy of tone, that she had been having a “most perfect time.” This is the very poetry of pleasure. In England, if our impression is correct, women hold the second fiddle in the great social harmony. You will never, at the sight of a carriage-load of mild-browed English maidens, with a presiding matron, plump and passive, in the midst of them, suspect their countrywomen of enjoying in the conventional world anything more than a fictitious and deputed dignity. They neither speak nor act from themselves, but from their husbands and brothers and lovers. On the Continent, women are proclaimed supreme; but we fancy them, with more or less justice, as maintaining their empire by various clandestine and reprehensible arts. With us—we may say it without bravado—they are both free and unsophisticated. You feel it most gratefully as you receive a confident bow from a pretty young girl in her basket-phaeton. She is very young and very pretty, but she has a certain delicate breadth of movement which seems to you a pure gain, without imaginable taint of loss. She combines, you reflect with respectful tenderness, the utmost of modesty with the least possible shyness. Shyness is certainly very pretty—when it is not very ugly; but shyness may often darken the bloom of genuine modesty, and a certain feminine frankness and confidence may often incline it toward the light. Let us assume, then, that all the young ladies whom you may meet here are the correctest of all possible young ladies. In the course of time, they ripen into the delightful women who divide your admiration. It is easy to see that Newport must be a most agreeable sojourn for the male sex. The gentlemen, indeed, look wonderfully prosperous and well-conditioned. They gallop on shining horses or recline in a sort of coaxing Herculean submission beside the lovely mistress of a phaeton. Young men—and young old men—I have occasion to observe, are far more numerous than at Saratoga, and of vastly superior quality. There is, indeed, in all things a striking difference in tone and aspect between these two great cities of pleasure. After Saratoga, Newport seems really substantial and civilized. Aesthetically speaking, you may remain at Newport with a fairly good conscience; at Saratoga, you linger on under passionate protest. At Newport, life is public, if you will; at Saratoga, it is absolutely common. The difference, in a word, is the difference between a group of three or four hotels and a series of cottages and villas. Saratoga perhaps deserves our greater homage, as being characteristically democratic and American; let us, then, make Saratoga the heaven of our aspiration, but let us yet a while content ourselves with Newport as the lordly earth of our residence.

The villas and cottages, the beautiful idle women, the beautiful idle men, the brilliant pleasure-fraught days and evenings, impart, perhaps, to Newport life a faintly European expression, in so far as they suggest the somewhat alien presence of leisure—“fine old Leisure,” as George Eliot calls it.