THE GRANITE COAST. 201 



sketch-book. The rocks are entkely of granite ; and 

 the huge wave-worn boulders, sudden pillars, and piles 

 of broad ledges into which they have been disrupted, 

 give endless variety to their forms. Sometimes they 

 have a castellated aspect, as at " Giant's Castle," on 

 the southern coast — a noble edifice of nature's cunning 

 architecture. Beautiful are the outlines of its topmost 

 grey shelving ledges, softened with shaggy pale-green 

 Byssus-lichen, — beautiful its huge rectangular masses 

 of warm light-brown, blackened here and there with 

 the mysterious beginnings of life, and darkening down- 

 wards to the shining deep-brown reefs that jut from 

 the Atlantic waves, which lift their curling masses of 

 crystal greenness into momentary splendour, and then 

 dash, and break, and whirl in milky eddies among the 

 ever-passive rocks. Passive are they ? Yes ; and yet 

 passivity itself is only a slower action, which escapes 

 our notice. The rocks, too, are mutinous with change, 

 could our eyes but follow it. They too, grow, and change, 

 and die, and give up their substances to the great All, 

 returning whence they came. Changeless they seem, 

 in contrast with the impatient waters ; and yet with 

 reluctant concession they give up their elements to the 

 ambient air, and to the confluent restlessness of water, 

 gradually rounding off their angles, and softening their 

 rugged asperities. Mysterious and beautiful law, 

 which ordains that the stubborn skeleton shall take 

 its moulding from the gentle pressure of the softer 

 flesh, as the sterner asperities of life are moulded finally 

 by tenderness and love. 



