Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 11, No. 27, June, 1873

Excerpt

A NEW ATLANTIS.

The New Year's debts are paid, the May-day moving is over and settled, and still a remnant of money is found sticking to the bottom of the old marmalade pot. Where shall we go?

There is nothing like the sea. Shall it be Newport?

But Newport is no longer the ocean pure and deep, in the rich severity of its sangre azul. We want to admire the waves, and they drag us off to inspect the last new villa: we like the beach, and they bid us enjoy the gardens, brought every spring in lace-paper out of the florist's shop. We like to stroll on the shore, barefooted if we choose, and Newport is become an affair of toilette and gold-mounted harness, a bathing-place where people do everything but bathe.

Well, Nahant, then, or Long Branch?

Too slow and too fast. Besides, we have seen them.

Suppose we try the Isles of Shoals? Appledore and Duck Island and White Island, now? Or Nantucket, or Marblehead?

Too stony, and nothing in particular to eat. You ask for fish, and they give you a rock.

In truth, under that moral and physical dyspepsia to which we bring ourselves regularly every summer, the fine crags of the north become just the least bit of a bore. They necessitate an amount of heroic climbing under the command of a sort of romantic and do-nothing Girls of the Period, who sit about on soft shawls in the lee of the rocks, and gather their shells and anemones vicariously at the expense of your tendon achilles. We know it, for we have suffered. We calculate, and are prepared to prove, that the successful collection of a single ribbon of ruffled seaweed, procured in a slimy haystack of red dulse at the beck of one inconsiderate girl, who is keeping her brass heels dry on a safe and sunny ledge of the Purgatory at Newport, may require more mental calculation, involve more anguish of equilibrium, and encourage more heartfelt secret profanity than the making of a steam-engine or the writing of a proposal.

No, no, we would admire nothing, dare nothing, do nothing, but only suck in rosy health at every pore, pin our souls out on the holly hedge to sweeten, and forget what we had for breakfast. Uneasy daemons that we are all winter, toiling gnomes of the mine and the forge—"O spent ones of a workday age"—can we not for one brief month in our year be Turks?

Our doctors, slowly acquiring a little sense, are changing their remedies. Where the cry used to be "drugs," it now is "hygiene." But hygiene itself might be changed for the better. We can imagine a few improvements in the materia medica of the future. Where the physician used to order a tonic for a feeble pulse, he will simply hold his watch thoughtfully for sixty seconds and prescribe "Paris." Where he was wont to recommend a strong emetic, he will in future advise a week's study of the works of art at our National Capital. For lassitude, a donkey-ride up Vesuvius. For color-blindness, a course of sunrises from the Rigi. For deafness, Wachtel in his song of "Di quella Pira." For melancolia, Naples....