Its success is due to its having nothing importunate about it. It
promises endless sea, sky, liberty and privacy, and, having made you
at home, it leaves you to your devices.

[Illustration: CONGRESS HALL.]

Two of our best marine painters in their works offer us a choice of
coast-landscape. Kensett paints the bare stiff crags, whitened with
salt, standing out of his foregrounds like the clean and hungry
teeth of a wild animal, and looking hard enough to have worn out the
painter's brush with their implacable enamel. From their treeless
waste extends the sea, a bath of deep, pure color. All seems keen,
fresh, beautiful and severe: it would take a pair of stout New England
lungs to breathe enjoyably in such an air. That is the northern coast.
Mr. William Richards gives us the southern--the landscape, in fact,
of Atlantic City. In his scenes we have the infinitude of soft silver
beach, the rolling tumultuousness of a boundless sea, and twisted
cedars mounted like toiling ships on the crests of undulating
sand-hills. It is the charm, the dream, the power and the peace of the
Desert.

And here let us be indulged with a few words about a section of our
great continent which has never been sung in rhyme, and which it
is almost a matter of course to treat disparagingly. A cheap and
threadbare popular joke assigns the Delaware River as the eastern
boundary of the United States of America, and defines the out-landers
whose homes lie between that current and the Atlantic Ocean as
foreigners, Iberians, and we know not what. Scarcely more of an exile
was Victor Hugo, sitting on the shores of Old Jersey, than is the
denizen of _New_ Jersey when he brings his half-sailor costume and his