One finds, indeed, nature and social life happily blended, the exclusiveness being rather protective than offensive.  The special charm of this piece of coast is that it is bold, much broken and indented, precipices fronting the waves, promontories jutting out, high rocky points commanding extensive views, wild and picturesque, and yet softened by color and graceful shore lines, and the forest comes down to the edge of the sea.  And the occupants have heightened rather than lessened this picturesqueness by adapting their villas to a certain extent to the rocks and inequalities in color and form, and by means of roads, allies, and vistas transforming the region into a lovely park.

Here, as at Newport, is cottage life, but the contrast of the two places is immense.  There is here no attempt at any assembly or congregated gayety or display.  One would hesitate to say that the drives here have more beauty, but they have more variety.  They seem endless, through odorous pine woods and shady lanes, by private roads among beautiful villas and exquisite grounds, with evidences everywhere of wealth to be sure, but of individual taste and refinement.  How sweet and cool are these winding ways in the wonderful woods, overrun with vegetation, the bayberry, the sweet-fern, the wild roses, wood-lilies, and ferns! and it is ever a fresh surprise at a turn to find one’s self so near the sea, and to open out an entrancing coast view, to emerge upon a promontory and a sight of summer isles, of lighthouses, cottages, villages—­Marblehead, Salem, Beverly.  What a lovely coast! and how wealth and culture have set their seal on it.

It possesses essentially the same character to the north, although the shore is occasionally higher and bolder, as at the picturesque promontory of Magnolia, and Cape Ann exhibits more of the hotel and popular life.  But to live in one’s own cottage, to choose his calling and dining acquaintances, to make the long season contribute something to cultivation in literature, art, music—­to live, in short, rather more for one’s self than for society—­seems the increasing tendency of the men of fortune who can afford to pay as much for an acre of rock and sand at Manchester as would build a decent house elsewhere.  The tourist does not complain of this, and is grateful that individuality has expressed itself in the great variety of lovely homes, in cottages very different from those on the Jersey coast, showing more invention, and good in form and color.

There are New-Yorkers at Manchester, and Bostonians at Newport; but who was it that said New York expresses itself at Newport, and Boston at Manchester and kindred coast settlements?  This may be only fancy.  Where intellectual life keeps pace with the accumulation of wealth, society is likely to be more natural, simpler, less tied to artificial rules, than where wealth runs ahead.  It happens that the quiet social life of Beverly, Manchester, and that region is delightful,