Might we not laugh at our world’s vaunted lore,
For ever boasting, “This, and this, I know”? 
Not all the science of its hard-won store
Can make one single fringed gentian grow. 
—­HOWARD GLYNDON.

NEWPORT A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

There is a magnetism in places which has as strong and subtle a potency as that which belongs to certain persons.  Newport, Rhode Island, is not an inapt example of the class of which I speak.  The wonderful mildness of the air, coupled with its exhilarating qualities; the fertility of the soil, which throws tropical vegetation over the stern realism of crag and precipice; the mixture of the wildest features of Nature with its softest and most intoxicating influences,—­all these anomalies, unexplained even by the proximity of the itself inexplicable Gulf Stream, combine to form a perfect and most desirable whole.  Nor is this description over-colored or the offshoot of the latter-day caprice that has made of the place a fashionable resort.  The very name of the State suggests that of a classic island famed for its atmosphere; and as Verrazano, writing in 1524, compares Block Island to Rhodes, it is possible that hence arose its title.  Neal in 1717, and the Abbe Robin in 1771, both speak of Newport as the Paradise of New England, and endorse its Indian appellation, Aquidneck, or the Isle of Peace.  Berkeley, dean of Derry, who came here in 1729 full of zealous but utopian plans of proselytism, writes of it that “the climate is warmer than Italy, and far preferable to Bermuda” (his original destination).  Indeed, it is to the good man’s enthusiasm for Newport that we owe his burst of poetical prophecy, “Westward the course of empire takes its way.”

If the staid and reverend Berkeley, he whom Swift, writing to Lord Carteret, recommends as “one of the first men in the kingdom for learning and virtue,” and of whom Pope exclaims, “To Berkeley every virtue under heaven,” found here this fascination, what wonder that more excitable pilgrims of Latin blood made of it a Mecca?  The French particularly came often to Newport in early colonial days, and have left jottings of their stay and the pleasure it afforded them.  Monsieur de Crevecoeur visited it in 1772, and found delight in its natural beauties.  He notes the bay and harbor, the approach to which he considers remarkably fine, and admires the acacia and plane trees which line the roads, all of which, unfortunately, were destroyed during the Revolution.  The young attache of the French legation of to-day, who chafes at the diplomatic duties which delay his shaking off the dust of Washington for the delights of Newport, hardly comprehends how much heredity has to do with his appreciation of it.  He does not stop to think, as he sips his post-prandial coffee at Hartman’s window, of the line of French chivalry that a century ago made their favorite promenade by the spot where he now sits.  His mind, running on Mrs. A——­’s