8o COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



charmed and awe-struck at the magnificence of sea and land 

 alike. 



Nowhere can waves, with all their varied loveliness of colour 

 and outline, be better studied than at the Land's End. At one 

 time soft as Correggio's tints, next moment wild with the green 

 splendour dear to Claude, always solemn as the colouring of 

 Titian, never the same even in their changeful combinations, 

 no wonder that our greatest poet-painter has attempted to fix 

 their evanescence for us. Those who do not know Turner's 

 picture will gain a conception of it from his interpreter's winged 

 words : 



" This is a study of sea whose whole organization has been 

 broken up by constant recoils from a rocky coast. ... It is 

 a solemn green grey (with its foam seen dimly through the 

 darkness of twilight), modulated with the fulness, changefulness, 

 and sadness of a deep wild melody."* And then Mr. Ruskin 

 proceeds to point out the confusion of tide, currents, and wind 

 in its composition. In short, the picture is an idealized view 

 of what, on a small scale, may be seen here any day in summer. 



From the curious white scabious and snowy centaury which 

 grows on these rocks, let us raise our eyes to the noble prospect. 

 Long banks of mist-like gloom, with a high projection here and 

 there, fade into light clouds on the horizon in front. A glass 

 resolves these heights into the peaks of the low-lying Scilly 

 Isles. Forty in number, and composed of the same granite as 

 the point on which we stand, they represent the western ex- 

 tremity of the fabled land of Lyonnesse, which tradition, if not 

 geology, reports to have sunk about the era of the Norman 

 Conquest. On the left, Pordenack Headland closes the view 

 a wild promontory, with a mile of rock-scenery between us and 

 those singular, isolated masses of granite in front Enys dodnan, 

 the Armed Knight, and the Dollar. Not far from us a quaint 

 block hung (as they all are here) with yellow and white lichens, . 

 * Modern Painters, vol. i. p. 373. 



