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 beach-learned manners into contrast with the thrift and hardness of the neighboring commonwealth.  The native of the alluvium is another being from the native of the great mineral State.  But, by the very reason of this difference, there is a strange soft charm that comes over our thoughts of the younger Jersey when we have done laughing at it.  That broad, pale peninsula, built of shells and crystal-dust, which droops toward the south like some vast tropical leaf, and spreads its two edges toward the fresh and salt waters, enervated with drought and sunshine—­that flat leaf of land has characteristics that are almost Oriental.  To make it the sea heaved up her breast, and showed the whitened sides against which her tides were beating.  To walk upon it is in a sense to walk upon the bottom of the ocean.  Here are strange marls, the relics of infinite animal life, into which has sunk the lizard or the dragon of antiquity—­the gigantic Hadrosaurus, who cranes his snaky throat at us in the museum, swelling with the tale of immemorial times when he weltered here in the sunny ooze.  The country is a mighty steppe, but not deprived of trees:  the ilex clothes it with its set, dark foliage, and the endless woods of pine, sand-planted, strew over that boundless beach a murmur like the sea.  The edibles it bears are of the quaintest and most individual kinds:  the cranberry is its native condiment, full of individuality, unknown to Europe, beautiful as a carbuncle, wild as a Tartar belle, and rife with a subacid irony that is like the wit of Heine.