Dear are his granite wilds, his schistine rocks
Encircled by the waves, where to the gale
The haggard cormorant shrieks, and, far beyond
Where the great ocean mingles with the sky,
Behold the cloud-like islands, grey in mist.
Another notable utterance was that of John Wesley, when on a Sunday in September, 1743, after preaching to the people at Sennen, he went down to look at the Land's End. "It was an awful sight," he wrote. "But how will this melt away when God ariseth in judgment! The sea beneath doth indeed boil like a pot. One would think the deep to be hoary. But though they swell yet can they not prevail. He shall set their bounds which they cannot pass."
There spoke the founder of Methodism, saturated in Biblical phraseology until it gushed spontaneously from him even as its song or cry from a bird. He had forgotten his own language, as it were, and even in an exalted moment in this grey north land could only express himself in these old Asiatic figures of speech.
To return from this digression. Although the vague image of an imagined Land's End fades from the mind and is perhaps lost when the reality is known, the ancient associations of the place remain, and, if a visit be rightly timed, they may invest it with a sublimity and fascination not its own. I loitered many days near that spot in midwinter, in the worst possible weather, but even when pining for a change to blue skies and genial sunshine I blessed the daily furious winds which served to keep the pilgrims away, and to half blot out the vulgar modern buildings with rain and mist from the Atlantic. At dark I would fight my way against the wind to the cliff, and down by the sloping narrow neck of land to the masses of loosely piled rocks at its extremity. It was a very solitary place at that hour, where one feared not to be intruded on by any other night-wanderer in human shape. The raving of the wind among the rocks; the dark ocean—exceedingly dark except when the flying clouds were broken and the stars shining in the clear spaces touched the big black incoming waves with a steely grey light; the jagged isolated rocks, on which so many ships have been shattered, rising in awful blackness from the spectral foam that appeared and vanished and appeared again; the multitudinous hoarse sounds of the sea, with throbbing and hollow booming noises in the caverns beneath—all together served to bring back something of the old vanished picture or vision of Bolerium as we first imagine it.
The glare from the various lighthouses visible at this point only served to heighten the inexpressibly sombre effect, since shining from a distance they made the gloomy world appear vaster. Down in the south, twenty-five miles away, the low clouds were lit up at short intervals by wide white flashes as of sheet lightning from the Lizard lights, the most powerful of all lights, the reflection of which may be seen at a distance of sixty or seventy miles at sea. In front of the Land's End promontory, within five miles of it, was the angry red glare from the Longships tower, and further away to the left the white revolving light of the Wolf lighthouse.