The castle stands among pale sand and long plumy grasses. The sand is deep within the hollow and roofless circuit of the broken walls, through which, here and there, come glimpses of sea or sky disconnected from any fragment of the land, so that I seem to stand between the sea and sky. In the summer ivy-leaved toad-flax buds and harebells, most delicate flowers, whisper from the crevices. But nothing lives here now. The trunk of an old tree that once grew through the walls is now so much worn that what it was when it lived is not to be known. Not only is all human life gone from here, but even the signs of its decay are invisible. The noble masonry can suffer no more except at the hands of men; it is too low and too strong. It is a rude crag. Neither history nor legend speaks intelligently of it. It is but known that it was raised by hands, and each man that comes to it has to build it again out of his own life and blood, or it remains not far removed from nothing. The wayfarer starts at the sight of it, tries in vain, shuddering at the cliff and the desolate sea, to conceive a life lived by beings like himself in such a place. To have lived there men must have had fairy aids or the blood of witches or of gods in their veins.
Here might easily have been builded in a night that phantom palace and its illusive pomps, where the Corinthian Lycius dwelt with the phantasmal Lamia until a philosopher’s eye unbuilt it again.
Or on these sands might have stood Myratana and blind Tiriel before the beautiful palace, and cursed their sons.
Or up in the vanished high bowman’s window the king’s daughter sat and harped and sang:—
“There sits a bird i’ my father’s garden,
An’ O! but she sings sweet!
I hope to live an’ see the day
When wi’ my love I’ll meet.”
When the sun has set, and land and sea are dissolved in cold mist, all but a circle of pale sand and the castle fragment, it seems true that here, to the foot of the tower that is gone, came the king’s daughter and wept and sighed and made a great moan: “Ah! he mourns not who does not mourn for love.” And the good king came and asked her if she desired to wed, and she answered, “Alas, sir, yes. Ah! he mourns not who does not mourn for love.”