“Oct. 4. After breakfasting at Yarmouth, set out in a bright morning for the Light-house above the Needles. As we rose, the Channel and the English coast, from Portsdown Hill (known by its long chalk-pit) to the shore near Pool in Dorsetshire, lay before us, bounded partly by the New Forest and thick inclosures, and spreading with towns and villages and innumerable seats and farms, with a vast extent of the northern part of the Isle of Wight, and with Southampton Bay, to Lymington, here and there a white house on the shore, snug under trees, and other house-tops peeping out, almost wherever I directed the glass, above the forest. Discovered Lyndhurst steeple, with the large white house at Mount Royal, ‘bosomed high in tufted trees.’ The whole country, from the neighbourhood of Southampton to the West, rises gradually from the shore into a line of horizon little varied; but the richness and cheerful beauty of this widely extending amphitheatre, seen over the calm blue Channel, with here and there a white sail and a ship of war at anchor, permit no desire for greater variety. As we rose upon the down, this scene enlarged: the Isle of Purbeck became more majestic; its outline is more mountainous than that of the Isle of Wight, with a range of high awful cliffs below. It was now tinged with misty azure, but the sun brightened all the sea before it. Two of its summits appeared finely in the perspective from Cowes’ Point. The effect of the sea so close on either hand of this vast western promontory, called the Needle Point, or the Alum rock, running out upon the ocean like a long narrow causeway, is awful. You have a wonderful and rather a painful sensation of the narrowness of the earth that bears you, though it may be half a mile, or more, in width. As the Needle rocks were not visible from the Light-house, we left the chaise, and descended the down half a mile, and looked upon them. On their summits, which now seem sharp, and splintered into ledges and points, perceived with the glass numbers of dark birds quietly seated; not one took wing, or uttered any cry. Perhaps it was owing to our great height, that the Needles disappointed us, and appeared insignificant, compared with the grander objects around us: listened to the surge breaking below, round the feet of these rocks. Did not venture near enough the edge to see into Alum Bay. Drove to Freshwater Bay. The inn at Freshwater Gate in the bottom is a little cottage, with two or three rooms apart on the beach. A ruinous and desolate shore spreads and rises on either hand. Mounted a promontory, which confined our view from the inn, on the right. Greatness and desolation. As the tide was coming in, could not see a cave in the cliff below. Returned to Yarmouth at five.” The following is Mrs. Radcliffe’s account of a visit to the tract called Undercliffe.