58 THE LAND'S END 



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 vari- 

 ous lighthouses visible at this point only served 

 to heighten the inexpressibly sombre effect, since 



