Over-darkened by no wealth of inland shade, without show or elegance or finish, they patiently partake of the fortunes of the era—of the vast blue glare which rises from the bay, and the storms which sweep inward from the ocean. They have been blown free of all needless accretion of detail—scorched clean of all graceful superfluities. Most of the population of this part of Newport is, I believe, of Quaker lineage. This double-salted Quakerism is abundant motive for this soundless and colorless simplicity.

One of the more recent movements of fashion is the so-called “New Drive”—the beautiful drive by the sea. The Avenue, where the Neck abruptly terminates, has been made to prolong itself to the west, and to wander for a couple of miles over a lovely region of beach and lowly down and sandy meadow and salt brown sheep-grass. This region was formerly the most beautiful part of Newport—the least frequented and the most untamed by fashion. I by no means regret the creation of the new road, however. A walker may very soon isolate himself, and the occupants of carriages stand a chance of benefit quite superior to their power of injury. The peculiar charm of this great westward expanse is very difficult to define. It is in an especial degree the charm of Newport in general—the combined lowness of tone, as painters call it, in all the earthy elements, and the extraordinary elevation of tone in the air. For miles and miles you see at your feet, in mingled shades of yellow and gray, a desolate waste of moss-clad rock and sand-starved grass. At your left surges and shines the mighty presence of the vast immediate sea. Above the broken and composite level of this double-featured plain, the great heavens ascend in innumerable stages of light. In spite of the bare simplicity of this prospect, its beauty is far more a beauty of detail than that of the average American landscape. Descend into a hollow of the rocks, into one of the little warm climates of five feet square which you may find there, beside the grateful ocean glare, and you will be struck quite as much by their fineness as by their roughness. From time to time, as you wander, you will meet a lonely, stunted tree, into the storm-twisted multiplicity of whose branches all the possible grace and grotesqueness of the growth of trees seem to have been finely concentrated. The region of which I speak is perhaps best seen in the late afternoon, from the high seat of a carriage on the Avenue. You seem to stand just without the threshold of the west. At its opposite extremity sinks the sun, with such a splendor, perhaps, as I lately saw—a splendor of the deepest blue, more luminous and fiery than the fiercest of our common vespertinal crimsons, all streaked and barred with blown and drifted gold. The whole vast interval, with its rocks and marshes and ponds, seems bedimmed into a troubled monotone of glorious purple. The near Atlantic is fading slowly into the unborrowed darkness of its deep, essential life. In the foreground, a short distance from the road, an old orchard uplifts its tangled stems and branches against the violet mists of the west. It seems strangely grotesque and enchanted. No ancient olive grove of Italy or Provence was ever more hoarily romantic. This is what people commonly behold on the last homeward bend of the drive. For such of them as are happy enough to occupy one of the villas on the cliffs, the beauty of the day has even yet not expired. The present summer has been emphatically the summer of moonlights. Not the nights, however, but the long days, in these agreeable homes, are what specially appeal to my fancy. Here you find a solution of the insoluble problem—to combine an abundance of society with an abundance of solitude. In their charming broad-windowed drawing-rooms, on their great seaward piazzas, within sight of the serious Atlantic horizon, which is so familiar to the eye and so mysterious to the heart, caressed by the gentle breeze which makes all but simple, social, delightful then and there seem unreal and untasteful—the sweet fruit of the lotus grows more than ever succulent and magical.