But no sooner was this done than the third of the party longed to return; and begged for "only five minutes" in that wonderful place, compared to which Dolor Ugo, and the other Lizard caves, became as nothing. They were beautiful, but this was terrible. Yet with its terror was mingled an awful delight. "Give me but five, nay, two minutes more!"
"Very well, just as you choose," was the response of meek despair. So of course, Poetry yielded. The boatmen were told to row on into daylight and sunshine—at least as much sunshine as the gigantic overhanging cliffs permitted. And never, never, never in this world shall I again behold that wonderful, mysterious sea-cave.
But like all things incomplete, resigned, or lost, it has fixed itself on my memory with an almost painful vividness. However, I promised not to regret—not to say another word about it; and I will not. I did see it, for just a glimpse; and that will serve.
Two more pictures remain, the last gorgeous sunset, which I watched in quiet solitude, sitting on a tombstone by Tintagel church—a building dating from Saxon times, perched on the very edge of a lofty cliff, and with a sea-view that reaches from Trevose Head on one side to Bude Haven on the other. Also, our last long dreamy drive; in the mild September sunshine, across the twenty-one miles of sparsely inhabited country which lie between Tintagel and Launceston. In the midst of it, on the top of a high flat of moorland, our driver turned round and pointed with his whip to a long low mound, faintly visible about half-a-mile off. "There, ladies, that's King Arthur's grave."
The third, at least, that we had either seen or heard of. These varied records of the hero's last resting-place remind one of the three heads, said to be still extant, of Oliver Cromwell, one when he was a little boy, one as a young man, and the third as an old man.
But after all my last and vividest recollection of King Arthur's country is that wild sail—so wild that I wished I had taken it alone—in the solitary boat, up and down the tossing waves in face of Tintagel rock; the dark, iron-bound coast with its awful caves, the bright sunshiny land, and ever-threatening sea. Just the region, in short, which was likely to create a race like that which Arthurian legend describes, full of passionate love and deadly hate, capable of barbaric virtues, and equally barbaric crimes. An age in which the mere idea of such a hero as that ideal knight
"Who reverenced his conscience as his God:
Whose glory was redressing human wrong:
Who spake no slander, no, nor listened to it:
Who loved one only, and who clave to her—"
rises over the blackness of darkness like a morning star.
If Arthur could "come again"—perhaps in the person of one of the descendants of a prince who was not unlike him, who lived and died among us in this very nineteenth century—