And really, as you read of her in Kingsley’s pages, she was a person to be feared, on more than supernatural grounds, being as brawny and muscular as a man: a good deal more so than her husband. It must be no sinecure, to be the husband of a witch, and a muscular one at that.
A stranger, tracing his hazardous way that night down the tangled glen, to the sea, would have had any stray beliefs he may have harboured as to the existence of mermaids presently confirmed; for we read that Rose, wishing to see who would be her future husband, by direction of the witch, undressed on the midnight beach, in the cold light of the full moon, waded waist-deep, into the sea with her mirror, and performed the incantation. Except that Kingsley speaks of the “blaze” of the midnight moon, it is a magnificent scene. Ordinary observers are at one with the poets—and at odds with Kingsley—in thinking of moonlight as a cold flood, rather than as a “blaze.”
A ring of flame, from the phosphorescence she stirred as she waded into the water, encircled her waist, and, as she looked down into the waves, every shell that crawled on the white sand was visible under the moonbeams, while the seaweeds waved like banners. Almost determined to turn and flee she, with an effort, dipped her head three times in the water, hurried out of the waves, and, looking through the strands of her wet hair into the mirror she carried, repeated the verse the white witch had taught her:
A maiden pure, lo! here I stand,
Neither on sea, nor yet on land;
Angels watch me on either hand.
If you be landsman, come down the strand;
If you be sailor, come up the sand;
If you be angel, come from the sky,
Look in my glass, and pass me by.
Look in my glass, and go from the shore;
Leave me, but love me for evermore.
It was with a not unnatural superstitious fear, under these magical moonlit circumstances that, even as she was gazing into the mirror and repeating those lines, hurried footsteps were heard descending to the Mouth. They were not, however, angelic or demoniac apparitions nor even earthly lovers: merely fugitive Jesuits and traitors.
It is sad to find this scene overlooked by those hideous stuccoed houses on the ridge, but, at any rate, as I straddle the little summer-time trickle of the stream in the bottom, dividing Devon and Cornwall, I cannot but admire the fine note of picturesqueness and high romance on which this coast-line ends.
AT MARSLAND MOUTH.