blowing in the wind, the sheep, chained in couples, that prick their
silly noses on nettles and furze, the old church, where bells tolled
without ringers on the day that Arthur fell, the old wayside cross,
the old stone dovecote in the vicarage garden, but not the cliffs and
the sea. For we drove up the coast to Boscastle, pausing on the
way--and that was our mistake--to see the little church of Forrabury.
This is the church that longed for a peal of bells to rival those of
Tintagel, but when the vessel that brought the bells was waiting for
the tide to take her into the harbour, and the pilot was thanking God
for a fair voyage, the captain laughed and swore that it was only
their own good seamanship they had to praise, whereupon a mighty
billow, far out at sea, swept down upon the ship and overwhelmed
her, only the devout pilot escaping with his life. And ever
since--so ballad and guide-book assured us--the tower of Forrabury
church has stood voiceless, though a muffled knell, when a storm is
coming up, is heard beneath the waves. What then was our righteous
wrath on finding this venerable edifice all newly done up in pink
frescoes,--yes, and with an ornate bell-rope of scarlet twist hanging
beneath the tower!
The harbour of Boscastle is a rock-walled inlet somewhat resembling
that of Pasajes in the north of Spain. Curving promontories shut in a
tidal stream that runs green in the sun and purple in the shadow.
Swift lines of creaming foam glint across where the river yields
itself up to the strong currents of the sea,--a sea which, as we saw
it that brilliant September afternoon, twinkled with myriad points of
intolerable light.
How can the pen cease from writing about Cornwall? And yet it must.
There is a devil--a printer's devil--that counts our idle words. I may
not tell of wind-swept Morwenstow, where Tennyson and Hawker roamed
the wave-fretted cliffs together and talked of the Table Round, nor of
lofty Launceston, with its ivied Norman keep and great granite church
whose outer walls are covered with elaborate carving. The sculptured
figure of Mary Magdalen at the east end, lying on her face in an
attitude of extreme dejection, is regularly stoned by the boys for
luck, and flints and shards were lodged, when we saw her, all over her
poor back. I may not tell of Bodwin, either, with its memory of a
mayor who took a prominent part in the West Country revolt against the
reformed service. As a consequence, when the agitation was over he was
called upon to entertain the royal commissioner, who hanged his host
after dinner.
It is a pity not to have space to suggest the softer beauties of the
south coast. From Truro, after a visit to its new cathedral with its
holy memory of Henry Martyn, we drove by way of Sunny Cove to Malpas.
The gulls were screaming as they sought their dinner on the flats, and
a man, wading through the pools, was gathering up belated little fishes
in his hands. We sailed between wooded banks down the Fal to Falmouth,
which is watched over by the garrisoned castle looming on Pendennis
Head. The old port lies in picturesque disorder along the inlet,
while the new town stands handsomely on the height above. Here we saw,
in lawns and gardens, a semi-tropical vegetation, yuccas, acacias,
bamboos, aloes, palms, and pampas grass. Would that there were time to
tell the smuggling scandals of the Killigrews, that witty and
graceless family who ought to have learned better from their Quaker
neighbours, the Foxes! It was by a Killigrew that Falmouth was founded
in the reign of the first Stuart, and Killigrews made merry in
Arwenach House, and made free with the merchandise of foreign ships,
for many a pleasant year. The time when piracy could be counted an
aristocratic amusement has gone by in Falmouth, as well as the
bustling days when this port was an important packet station whence
coaches and postchaises went speeding up to London. It is now putting
on the gentler graces and coming into repute as a winter resort,
though it has not yet attained the popularity of Penzance.
On our way from the one to the other we passed through the mining town
of Redruth, near which, in the hollow known as Gwennap Pit, Wesley
addressed vast audiences. On one occasion the number was reckoned as
thirty-two thousand. "I shall scarce see a larger congregation," he
wrote, "till we meet in the air." The more mystical doctrines of Fox
took little hold on the rough fishermen and miners of Cornwall, but
Wesley practically converted the Duchy, turning it from the most
lawless corner of England, a lair of smugglers and wreckers, into a
sober, well-conducted community. As little flames are said to be seen
playing about a converted Cornishman, Wesley's path across the county
must have been a veritable Milky Way. In such natural amphitheatres as
Gwennap Pit, it may be that the Cornish Miracle Plays, so far
excelling the English in freedom of fancy and symbolic suggestion,
were given. We looked wistfully from Hayle over to St. Ives, with its
long line of fishing boats tied up like horses to a church fence, but
since we could follow only one road at once, held on our way to
Penzance.
[Illustration: THE LIZARD LIGHT, CORNWALL]
Beautiful for situation, the "Holy Headland" looks out over waters
exquisitely coloured toward
"the great Vision of the Guarded Mount,"
St. Michael's Mount, a solemn cone, fortress-crowned, above which a
praying hermit, when the setting sun was flooding the skies with
splendour, might easily have deemed he saw the guardian wings of the
Archangel. As all Cornish children know, this mount was built by the
giant Cormoran and rose, in those days when Mount's Bay was a fertile
plain of several parishes, from the midst of a forest, "a hoare rock
in a wood." It was the scene of the glorious exploit of Jack the
Giant-Killer, who was afterwards appointed tutor to King Arthur's
eldest son in that special branch of warfare. Cornwall is so fond of
its old giants that it sometimes, so folklorists say, confuses their
deeds with those of the saints. But it loves its saints, too, who are
said to be more numerous than the saints in Paradise. Cornish churches
stand open all day long, and old Cornwall's affectionate name for the
Virgin was "Aunt Mary."
The view ranges on across Mount's Bay to The Lizard, that peninsula so
beautiful with its serpentine cliffs and Cornish heath, the wildest
and loneliest part of all wild and lonely Cornwall; but our route lay
to its companion point on the southwest. Our driver literally knew
every inch of the road and pointed out to us cross after cross, and
cromlech after cromlech,--such vague old stones, worn featureless and
almost formless, built into walls, half sunken under the turf,
embedded in banks, peering at us from across a field, thrusting a grey
visage through a hedge,--sometimes a mere time-eaten stump, sometimes
a heathen monolith with the afterthought of a crucifix rudely graved
upon it, sometimes a complete square cross. These last we often found
in churchyards, set up on stone platforms approached by a flight of
steps. Such was the one we noted in the churchyard of St. Buryan,
another of those long, low, lofty-towered old churches characteristic
of Cornwall.
As we neared Penberth Cove, the Atlantic opened out to view, its
sparkling turquoise relieved by one white sail. It was in Penberth Cove
that there once lived a bedridden old woman, a good old soul, about
whose one-roomed cottage the Small People, to divert her, used to sport
all day, catching her mice and riding them in and out of holes in the
thatch, dancing the dust off the rafters and giving trapeze and
tight-rope performances on the cobwebs. The valley runs green to the
sea and we left the carriage for a walk across the fields, a walk
diversified by stiles of all known species, to Treryn Castle. This
monstrous fastness of heaped rock and jagged crag was built by a giant
who was such a clever necromancer that all he had to do was to sit in
the Giant's Easy-chair, to whose discomfort we can testify, and will
the castle to rise out of the sea. For latter-day necromancy, our guide
pointed out Porthcurnow Beach, where, he said, six submarine cables
land. He was a native of the coast, a fisherman, and gave us eyes to
see the gulls rejoicing over their feast of pilchards, and ears to hear
the whistle of a young otter. The Lion of Treryn is the Logan Rock, but
we first encountered, in our scramble over the crags, Lady Logan, a
stumpy personage whose hood and skirt, though recognisable, are of the
Stone Age fashion. This granite beauty is so sensitive in her feelings
that she trembles at a touch. As we climbed higher among the rocks, in
the exhilarating air, we won views ever more wonderful of rolling green
billows shattered into clouds of spray upon the shore. The Logan
itself is an enormous rocking-stone,--a boulder weighing some seventy
tons delicately balanced on cubical masses of rock. It does not, like
the rocking-stone in Burma on which a little pagoda has been built,
oscillate in the wind, but swings at a sturdy push. It was formerly
more easily swayed than now, for a mischievous young Goldsmith, nephew
of the poet who was himself so prankishly inclined, undertook in 1824,
when commanding a revenue cutter off this coast, to dispel the popular
notion that no human force could dislodge Logan Rock. On the eighth of
April, though the first would have been more appropriate, he landed
with a crew of eight men, meaning to tip the stone over into the sea.
But he only succeeded in moving it some four feet to the left and, even
so, found his escapade an expensive one, for it cost ten thousand
dollars to replace the ponderous mass--as the anger of the people
compelled the Admiralty to order him to do--on its original pivot. With
all his efforts, he could not hit the perfect poise, and whereas Logan
Rock once had the power of healing sick children who were rocked upon
it, that spell no longer works. It was not the right hour for us to
ascertain whether touching the stone thrice three times would still
make a woman a witch. This test should be undertaken at midnight, when
a battalion of sympathetic hags, mounted on stems of ragwort, would be
hooting encouragement from their favourite rendezvous at the towering
crag south of Logan Rock known as Castle Peak.
[Illustration: LAND'S END]
We returned to our carriage and drove on. The fields of gorse and
heather suddenly slipped over foaming reefs and we were at Land's End.
Great waves were churning themselves white against the ledges. A few
sails glinted on the horizon; a few gulls were perching on the rocks;
but we were, at first, aware of nothing save the steep, broken wall of
granite and the strange, compelling song of the Atlantic. By degrees
we noted light-houses, bays, and a curious cavern, with such
wave-eaten arches as we had seen at Biarritz, beneath our very feet.
We walked along the edge of the cliffs, green with turf to the sheer
plunge. At places, indeed, the heather runs down the rocks to meet the
tide. We passed close by gulls that stood unstartled in this their own
domain of crags and spray-dashed gorges, eyeing severely the approach
of uninvited guests.
The sun was setting and we could distinguish the Scilly Isles like
gold cloudlets resting on the sea. Between these islands and Land's
End once bloomed the lost Arthurian realm of Lyonesse. But weary of
the past and its dim fables, our hearts followed that rippling line of
splendour further and further west, far out across the Atlantic to the
land of hope and promise, the strong young land that fronts the
future, vowed to the great adventure of human brotherhood.
The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A.
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
Obvious printer's errors repaired. Otherwise, unusual spellings and
grammar--including hyphenation inconsistencies--were retained as in
the original.
P. 253, "Both fine and cleane..."; Although opening quotes usually
indicate a new stanza, in this case there was no blank line between
this line and the line before it.