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Updated: May 21, 2025
We landed at Appledore, on which is Laighton's Hotel, a large building with a piazza or promenade before it, about an hundred and twenty feet in length, or more, yes, it must be more. It is an edifice with a centre and two wings, the central part upwards of seventy feet.
It was not extraordinary that the joy of human intercourse, after such estrangement, became a rapture to so loving a nature as Celia Laighton's; nor that, very early, before the period of fully ripened womanhood, she should have been borne away from her island by a husband, a man of birth and education, who went to preach to the wild fisher folk on the adjacent island called Star.
He had probably followed the small fish into the bay, and got bewildered, and, at one time, he was almost aground. Oscar, Mr. Laighton's son, ran down with a gun, and fired at the shark, which was then not more than ten yards from the shore.
If the day is clear, he will see the famous Isle of Shoals, lying nine miles away Appledore, Smutty-Nose, Star Island, White Island, etc.; there are nine of them in all. On Appledore is Laighton's Hotel, and near it the summer cottage of Celia Thaxter, the poet of the Isles.
Laighton's ballad reminds me of that Portsmouth has been prolific in poets, one of whom, at least, has left a mouthful of perennial rhyme for orators Jonathan Sewell with his "No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, But the whole boundless continent is yours." I have somewhere seen a volume with the alliterative title of "Poets of Portsmouth," in which are embalmed no fewer than sixty immortals!
Laighton's Hotel, together with the house in which his son-in-law resides, which was likewise built by Laighton, and stands about fifty yards from the hotel, occupies the middle of a shallow valley, which passes through the island from east to west. Looking from the veranda, you have the ocean opening towards the east, and the bay towards Rye Beach and Portsmouth on the west.
Laighton's doughnuts, of which there was always an unfailing supply, so that numbers of people came there. Among them was a recent graduate of Harvard, from the vicinity of Boston, named Levi Thaxter. He was a young man of refined tastes and rare intellectual endowment; afterwards widely known as the apostle of Browning's poetry in America.
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