I was fortunate in visiting this gem of the sea, during the most pleasant part of the year. The hay-makers were at work, and everywhere a delicious fragrance filled the air. Our drive from Newport to Chale afforded many pleasing views, and my first view of the open sea was enchanting. The channel was as smooth as glass, and the vessels that lay upon it scarcely seemed to move. From the celebrated Black-gang Chine, the view of the chalky coast of Dorset, the curving shore of Freshwater-bay, and the bristling file of cliffs, called “the Needles,” was truly superb. Then wheeling round the bold head of St. Catherine’s Downs, we entered that sweet realm of Faerie, called the Undercliff, where a palisade of rock rises on one side of the road, and the sea-beach lies below, the exposure being such as to receive the breath and the sunshine of the genial south, with all the vigorous breezes of the ocean. Here the roses bloom all the year in the open air, and Nature has made it all that Nature could, by a combination of her charms. Indeed, the circuit of the coast, from here to Yaverland, seen, at various hours of the day, in all the shifting effects of the sun and shadows, affords a panorama of incomparable attractions: here a dense grove, and there a deep cleft in the rocks, intercepting the sea-view, and then, again, a fresh apocalypse of beauty, breaking upon the sight, at some unexpected turn of the way. The murmur of ocean comes to the ear just as the eye catches the numberless smiles of its surface, and a glimpse through green foliage will often discover a brilliant perspective, in which the blue sea, and the gray rocks, and the fading horizon, are enlivened by a stretching show of snowy canvas, reflecting the golden light of the sun, sail after sail, the tiniest glittering far off on the verge of the expanse, like a star in the twilight.