By which things made for use so rare
Are powerful and delicate and fair.
In Calderon's celebrated drama, Life's a Dream, when Sigismund laments his miserable destiny, comparing it with that of the wild creatures which inhabited the forest where he is kept a prisoner, the contrast between his lot and theirs seems greatest when he considers the birds, perfect in form, lovely in colouring, graceful in their motions, and so wonderful in their faculty of flight; while he, a being with a higher nature, a greater, more aspiring soul, had no such liberty! We need not be so unhappy as the Polish prince to envy the birds their freedom. I watch and am never tired of watching their play. They rise and fall and circle, and swerve to this side and to that, and are like sportive flies in a room which has the wind-roughened ocean for a floor, and the granite cliffs for walls, and the vast void sky for ceiling. The air is their element: they float on it and are borne by it, abandoned to it, effortless, even as a ball of thistledown is borne; and then, merely by willing it, without any putting forth of strength, without a pulsation, to rise vertically a thousand feet, to dwell again and float upon an upper current, to survey the world from a greater altitude and rejoice in a vaster horizon. To fly like that! To do it all unconsciously, merely by bringing this or that set of ten thousand flight muscles into play, as we will to rise, to float, to fall, to go this way or that—to let the wind do it all for us, as it were, while the sight is occupied in seeing and the mind is wholly free! The balloons and other wretched machines to which men tie themselves to mount above the earth serve only to make the birds' lot more enviable. I would fly and live like them in the air, not merely for the pleasure of the aerial exercise, but also to experience in larger measure the sense of sublimity.
But this is a delusion, seeing that we possess such a sense only because we are bound to earth, because vast cliffs overhanging the sea and other altitudes are in some degree dangerous. At all events Nature says they are, and we are compelled to bow to her whether we know better or not. We cannot get over the instinct of the heavy mammalian that goes on the ground, whose inherited knowledge is that it is death or terrible injury to fall from a considerable height. Only so long as we are quite safe is this instinct a pleasurable one; but when we look over the edge of a sheer precipice, how often, in spite of reason, does the pleasure, the fearful joy, lose itself in apprehension! Could we know that it would not hurt us to drop off, purposely or by accident, that the air itself and a mysterious faculty in us would sustain us, that it would no more hurt us to be flung from the summit of a cliff than it would hurt a jackdaw, we should be as the bird is, without a sense of sublimity.
Daw and herring gull, the most abundant species, were but two of several kinds I was accustomed to see from the headlands, and some of the others were greater birds—the great black-backed gull, as big a gull as there is in the world, who had a rock to himself near the Land's End, where four or five couples could be seen congregated; and the shag, the cormorant which abounds most on this coast. They are heavy, ungainly flyers, and have an ugly reptilian look when fishing in the sea, but seen standing erect and motionless, airing their spread wings, they have a noble decorative appearance, like carved bird-figures on the wet black jagged rocks amid the green and white tumultuous sea. There, too, was the ancient raven, and he was the most irreconcilable of all. At one spot on the cliff close to where I was staying a solitary raven invariably turned up to shadow me. He would fly up and down, then alight on a rock a hundred yards away or more and watch me, occasionally emitting his deep hoarse human-like croak; but it failed to frighten me away or put me in a passion, as I was not a native. The Cornishman of the coast, when he hears that ominous sound, mocks the bird: "Corpse! corpse! you devil! If I had a gun I'd give you corpse!" It is not strange the raven views the human form divine with suspicion in these parts: he is much persecuted by the religious people hereabouts, and when they cannot climb up or down to his nest on a ledge of the cliff, they are sometimes able to destroy it by setting fire to a furze bush and dropping it upon the nest from above.
[Original]
The rocky forelands I haunted were many, but the favourite one was Gurnard's Head, situated about midway between St. Ives and Land's End. It is the grandest and one of the most marked features of that bold coast. Seen from a distance, from one point of view, the promontory suggests the figure of a Sphinx, the entire body lying out from the cliff, the waves washing over its huge black outstretched paws and beating on its breast, its stupendous deformed face composed of piled masses of granite looking out on the Atlantic. I was often there afterwards, spending long hours sitting on the rocks of the great head and shoulders, watching the sea and the birds that live in it; and later, when April set the tiny bell of the rock pipit tinkling, and the wheatear, hovering over the crags, dropped his brief delicious warble, and when the early delicate flowers touched the rocks and turf with tender, brilliant colour, I was more enamoured than ever of my lonely castle by the sea. Forced to leave it I could but chew samphire and fill my pockets with its clustered green finger-like leaves, so as to have the wild flavour of that enchanting place as long as possible in my mouth and its perfume about me.
Now I wish only to relate an adventure which befell me on that midwinter day on the occasion of my first visit, when nothing happened and I saw nothing particular except with the mind's eye, for this was an adventure of the spirit.