158 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



all human uses and from most wayfaring. Thus they 

 share the sublimity of beacons and are about to show that 

 tombs also have their deaths. Linnet and stonechat and 

 pipit seem to attend upon them, with pretty voices and 

 motions and a certain ghastliness, as of shadows, given to 

 their cheerful and sudden flittings by the solemn neigh- 

 bourhood. But most of their hold upon the spirit they 

 owe to their powerful suggestion that here upon the high 

 sea border was once lived a bold proud life, like that of 

 Beowulf, whose words, when he was dying from the 

 wounds of his last victory, were : " Bid the warriors raise 

 a funeral mound to flash with fire on a promontory above 

 the sea, that it may stand high and be a memorial by 

 which my people shall remember me, and seafarers driving 

 their tall ships through the mist of the sea shall say : 

 ' Beowulf's Mound.' " 



In Cornwall as in Wales, these monuments are the 

 more impressive, because the earth, wasting with them 

 and showing her bones, takes their part. There are days 

 when the age of the Downs, strewn with tumuli and 

 the remnants of camp and village, is incredible; or rather 

 they seem in the course of long time to have grown 

 smooth and soft and kind, and to be, like a rounded 

 languid cloud, an expression of Earth's summer bliss of 

 afternoon. But granite and slate and sandstone jut out, 

 and in whatsoever weather speak rather of the cold, drear, 

 hard, windy dawn. Nothing can soften the lines of 

 Trendreen or Brown Willy or Cam Galver against the 

 sky. The small stone-hedged ploughlands amidst brake 

 and gorse do but accentuate the wildness of the land from 

 which they have been won. The deserted mines are frozen 

 cries of despair as if they had perished in conflict with 



