ST. MICHAEL’S MOUNT.
It is reached from Marazion by boat at high-water, or on foot by the causeway when the tide is low. From the little harbour we climb, on a winding cobbled path among the trees and hydrangeas, the steep hill that so many have climbed on sterner errands: Henry de la Pomeroi, serving Prince John while the Lion was still safely caged; Lord Oxford and his men, disguised as pilgrims, entering the monastery with the help of pious words and seizing it with the swords they wore under their habits; the angry adherents of the Old Faith, charging up the hill with great trusses of hay borne before them, “to blench the defendants’ sight and deaden their shot.” Unfortunately there have been modern visitors nearly as turbulent as these; for which reason there is not much that we are allowed to see here to-day. We may go into the chapel where the monks once worshipped, and we may stand on the little paved terrace and look out over the parapet towards the shore, thinking of Lady Katherine Gordon, who surely stood here sometimes while her husband Perkin Warbeck was on his mad adventure. What were her thoughts of him as she stood here? Did she know him to be an impostor? Did she think he was the King? Or did she only dream, and dream again, of that quick wooing up in Scotland by the boy of “visage beautiful”? “Lady,” he had said, “… what I am now you see, and there is no boasting in distress; what I may be, I must put it to the trial.… If you dare now adventure on the adversity I swear to make you partaker of the prosperity; yea, lay my crown at your feet.” To which the lady had made answer: “My Lord, … I think you, for your gentleness and fair demeanour, worthy of any creature or thing you could desire.… Therefore, noble Sir, repair, I say, to the master of the family.”
It was here at St. Michael’s Mount that they found her, when Perkin’s little fight was over and her own little bubble had burst.
A wide and level road takes us round the bay into Penzance, and up the hill whence Sir Humphry Davy looks down upon the street where he was born, and past the spot—now covered by the market-house—where Sir Francis Godolphin once tried in vain to make a stand against the Spaniards, and on, beside the sea, to Newlyn. This is a name that is known wherever pictures are painted or beloved; and no wonder, for there is nothing in this harbour that an artist might not turn to good account. Here are fishing-boats reflected in the ripples, and piers hung with dripping seaweed, and lobster-creels and nets upon the shore; and beyond them is the high sea-wall with flowers in every cranny, and the steep street curving round the harbour, and the people whom so many painters have taught us to know. For all its charm and fame it has changed little since the sixteenth century. It is still a place with a business in life; still, as then, mainly a “fischar towne,” with “a key for shippes and bootes.”
NEWLYN HARBOUR.
Rejoining the main road to Land’s End, we pass through some pretty but very hilly country to Lower Hendra. Those who wish to see the Logan Rock must turn to the left here, and run down to the sea through St. Buryan, and finally walk for some distance across fields. Most people, I think, will keep to the high-road; but lovers of old churches will wish to turn aside to the sanctuary of that “holy woman of Irelond,” St. Buriana. From this high ground, where the tall tower stands as a landmark visible for many miles, King Athelstane saw the distant Scilly Isles, and here he vowed to build a college if he should return safely after making the islands his own. This Perpendicular building dates, of course, from a far later century than his; but it was the church of the college he founded, and there were parts of the college itself still standing in Cromwell’s day.
St. Buryan is only four miles from Land’s End. They are rather dreary miles, by undulating fields and stone walls and the intensely melancholy little town of Sennan; but they end, all the more dramatically for their dulness, in the granite walls that guard our utmost shore. There is no dulness here.
Here there is no carpet of sea-pinks, nor splash of flaming lichen as at the Lizard, nor rocks fretted into fantastic shapes by the sea; but an imperturbable front of iron, an unyielding bulwark, a stern England that rules the waves. This is a fitting climax to our coast. On each side of us cliff curves beyond cliff, and headland stretches beyond headland. To the right are the blue waters of Whitesand Bay, where Athelstane landed from the conquered Scilly Isles and John from unconquered Ireland, and far away Cape Cornwall bounds the view. With swelling hearts we stand on the cliff and look out over the buried land of Lyonesse, and beyond the Longships Lighthouse, to the wide seas on which Drake and Raleigh sailed away to the Spanish Main, and Rodney to victory, and Grenville to the death that made him deathless, and Blake to Teneriffe, and Nelson to Trafalgar. The salt wind blows in across those seas and sings in our ears:
“When shall the watchful Sun,