Land's End

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

THE next morning there was a driving storm, but I determined to see Land's End that day, and was rather glad that I could see it in all its grandeur.

I started early with a silent but well-mannered driver, in an open wagon, and with a powerful fast-trotting bay horse. The wind blew too hard for an umbrella ; so, tucking ourselves in as well as we could, we made up our minds for a thorough wetting. The drive to Land's End in a direct line is about eleven miles, though longer by the course we took. We skirted the bay till the road began to ascend toward New Lyn, giving us broad views of Penzance and the harbor. We came at length upon the high tableland, rocky and dismal, with a little sprinkling of grass and Cornish fern.

As if determined to get to myself all the disagreeabilities possible that day, I alighted in the neighborhood of Lemorna Cove, and ran down to see the rock scenery of that rugged bay, intending to meet my wagon at another point around some-where further on. After a scrambling, lonely walk, aver stone and bog, I came out, as I supposed, at ;he appointed spot, but no carriage was there. It was a desolate place and a wild storm. I was puzzled what to do. I thought it best to walk on in what I conceived to be the direction of Penzance, thinking that I might corne upon a house, or meet a traveler. After walking some time in this state of suspense, to my great satisfaction my lone dog-cart hove in sight at a considerable distance off, coming in a totally opposite direction from what I had anticipated. I will not pretend to go into explanations ; but the driver declared that he had been faithful to his part of the engagement, had been to the appointed place, and not finding me there, had come on to seek me. " All 's well that ends well," I thought, especially if it lands me at Land's End.

We left St. Buryan to the right, with its lofty old church-tower four hundred and sixty-seven feet above the sea level, the most conspicuous object on the moor, and a beacon to ships far out at sea. I stopped to examine the Druidic circle of the "Merry Maidens and Piper," consisting of six-teen moss grown gray stones ranged in a circular form. They were once, it is said, frolicsome Cornish maidens, petrified for dancing on Sunday. But how hard and angular they have grown since then ! In the storm-wind that whistled by them the ancient piper might be heard to play again, but their dancing days are over. This circle be-longs doubtless to the same ancient Celtic system of burial, or worship, to which Stonehenge belonged.

Cornwall is full of these old circles and cromechs ; it is the land of pagan legend and mystery. It does not look like green, sunny, merry, Christian England. It has a wild, broken, granitic scenery. Its very names have strange old heathen sounds such as Lemorna, Trengothal, Trereen, Lanyon, Penryn, Madon !

We stopped for a moment to see an antique stone cross, — a cross within a circle. It was a remnant of the earliest days of Christianity in England. How it did rain and blow when I tramped down from the streaming thatched-roofed cottages of Trereen, over the rocky meadows to the sea-side, to take a look at the " Logan Stone." It was any thing but a comfortable feat to climb up to it, and still less atop of it, in such a storm. But I was fairly in for it. I shall always contend that it was just the season, and just the day of all days, to see this grand rock-coast scenery. Who would go to Italy in mid-winter for Italian scenery ! Who would see Land's End in summer sunshine !

The " Logan Stone " is a detached mass of rock, perched on a lofty promontory jutting out into the sea, and is about seventeen feet high, and weighs. sixty-five tons. My guide laid his broad shoulders to it, and made it rock slightly. It was once thrown over by the freak of an English midshipman, and was reinstated with great difficulty and expense. Being originally a cubical mass of granite, by the action of storm and time its base had become disintegrated, so that t now rests on a separate neck or pivot. The perpendicular rocks about it, seamed and scarred, with the hollow scooped out by rain and storm, called " The Giant's Throne," like the chair in which Gφthe's ancient king sat, when he cast the golden goblet into the sea, are fully as interesting in themselves as the " Logan Stone." Treryn Castle, in the days of the Britons, is said to have stood here. I am inclined to think, however, that the castellated conformation of the rocks has given rise to this tradition. Here also is a fine point of view of the stern coast scenery, the rocky headlands and deep indented bays, with great caverns dug out by the waves, and " swilled by the wild and wasteful ocean."

We went on, turning here and there into crossroads, that would have sorely puzzled a stranger. It seemed as if now that point ahead were Land's End, and then another point, and then another still. The scenery grew more desolate and dismal, this effect being undoubtedly heightened by the black storm. We passed a cheerless stone house facing the ocean, upon one side of which was written " The Last Inn in England," and upon the other side " The First Inn in England."

When we ,actually turned down to go out to the promontory termed Land's End, I will not say that the wind blew us bodily off the road, if road it might be called over the moor; but it seemed at one time doubtful whether we could stem the storm, or make any headway at all. The blasts from the ocean were tremendous. In such a storm sweeping around England's coast, Shakspeare must have written the words that Macbeth spoke to the witches : —

" Though you untie the winds, and let them fight
Against the churches; though the yesty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up;
Though bladed corn be lodged, and trees blown down;
Though castles topple on their warders' heads ;
Though palaces and pyramids do slope
Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure
Of Nature's germins tumble all together,
Even till destruction sicken, answer me
To what I ask you."

There is an idea of the all-levelling might of the ocean blast, in these lines, that one can better appreciate who is mad enough to attempt to face it, on the barren unprotected slopes that lead out to the extreme end, — or one might say, — the prow of England, where she plunges into the Atlantic.

When we came at length to actually the last house in England, a lonely low fisherman's hovel, standing slightly on one side of the promontory termed " Land's End," we had to take advantage of a slight lull to run from the shed to the house. There was no seeing it at that moment. A man could not well go upon the rocks at the height of such a tempest. He would have run the risk of being blown of like a cotton ball. The sea just below us was in a state of furious agitation. Through the rain and the flying scud we could just see, with a glass, the tall white pillar of " Long Ships Light-'souse," a mile from shore, to the top of which the foam of the billows flew, though it stands one hundred and twelve feet above the level of the sea.

Some coals were smouldering on the rude hearth, and the old fisherman who inhabits the house roasted a pilchard, and with a cup of tea and hard sea-biscuit, we made a famous meal. It was of little use to attempt to dry our clothes.

After waiting an hour or so, there seemed to be some abatement of the storm, or there was, at least, a perceptible interval between the blasts. In one of these comparative lulls, the fisherman said we might make a run for it. We had to traverse quite a tract or hollow, and then climb over the crown of a hill. The fisherman and I started at a rapid run. Before we reached the top of the promontory, the gust came on again, and I had to depend upon my guide's strong arm to stagger against the violence of the side-blast, and to get over the hill into a more sheltered spot. Great flakes of blinding foam flew like a snow-storm over and around. When we had struggled over the hill, we crept along its side under the lee of some cliffs, though the bank of slippery turf slopes off here quite abruptly. Proceeding carefully, and clinging to the summit of the cliffs, we picked our way down, shelf after shelf, worming through and over the crags, till we came to a jutting mass of rock beyond which there was nothing, and holding me in his iron grasp, the guide and I stepped upon this outstanding rock, and looking over its edge into the foaming abyss below, stood upon " Land's End."

I stayed long enough to knock off a bit of granite, and then retired a few steps to a more sheltered position, where I might take a deliberate view of the scene. Just above us were the dark and storm-scarred fronts of the granite cliffs, rising in some kind of columnar regularity, as if they were the gigantic advance-guard of England, stationed here to receive the first shock of tempests.

Off the crest to our left was the long and singularly shaped rock, called " The Armed Knight ; " and a few more black and formidable crags stretched from the end of the promontory, though buried at moments amid the boiling waves.

How grand, beyond description, was the sight of the roused Atlantic hurling its maddened strength upon the rocks, which bore the marks of a thou-sand such conflicts, and were there still, firm and unshaken, where God had placed them, to guard the land !

I watched the great billows pouring swiftly in upon the land, unconscious that they had come to the end of their course, and then suddenly, furlously, flinging themselves on high, as if in astonishment at meeting resistance, covering the tallest cliffs with their rage and foam.

In creeping back over the crags, I found we had come over a natural arch, which links the extremity of the promontory to the main land. By stretching one's self upon a ledge, and looking around a corner, one sees clean through the vault beneath into which the ocean rushes and roars as if in play.

We saw a mast with tangled cordage still hang ing to it, rolling and tumbling about in the foam, which my guide said must have been a part of a very recent wreck.

Of course I did not see the Scilly Islands in such weather. They may be seen, however, if I mistake not, in clear weather, from this point The tradition is that they were once connected with the main land ; and fable and mystery still enwrap them, lying as they do in the very eye of the sunset far out on the lonely wastes of the ocean. There are to be found in these islands, it is said, spots of greenery and beauty that are truly delicious.

Regaining the house, and waiting some time longer for the storm to subside a little, we made a start for Sennen and the Botallack mines ; and amid a driving tempest of rain we went on to the north, over a bleak moorland, passing by very few villages or signs of habitations, leaving the frowning headland of Cape Cornwall on our left, and in the latter part of the afternoon reached Botallack.

There are few things in the works of man more daring or wonderful than the Botallack mines ; for where the veins of copper and tin run off into the ocean, there man has .stationed himself to intercept them, and has not only followed them to the edge of the land, but has pursued them far under the sea.

Along the face of a lofty precipice which decends sheer into the ocean, and is exposed to al.

the fury of the Atlantic, mining works, tramways, and ladders, have been constructed, so that they dangle down over the face of the enormous cliff in the most extraordinary and appalling way. Half down the precipice a steam-engine is stationed, which serenely pumps away in spite of wind and storm. Far up above it on the edge of the rock are other works ; for the ore is carried up the face of the cliff to the upper sheds, as if men were literally living and working over the steepest side of Gibraltar. I went to the mouth of the midway shaft with the intention of descending into the mine ; but it was Saturday afternoon, paying-time, and the mines were not in operation.

This mine, I have said, runs under the ocean ; and it comes up in one place where the miners have pursued a vein to within five or six feet of the floor of the ocean, so that in a storm, the rolling and grinding of the great rocks and pebbles on the bed of the ocean overhead may be distinctly heard ; and always the solemn thunder of the sea is faintly audible.

The Botallack mines are now chiefly worked for copper, although they have yielded in former times very richly in tin ; and they are said to have afforded a profit at one time of £300,000.

On the edge of the evening we reached Pendeen ; and we drove up in the midst of the still violent tempest to the door of Rev. Mr. A.'s house, the clergyman to whom I had a note of introduction. His house was situated in a large yard, with a high wall around it, containing his church and house, — in fact a kind of modern "conventual establishment " on a small scale. A large, commanding-looking, elderly gentleman, in a long black cassock, or dressing-gown, received me at the door with great cordiality ; and soon I was drying my dripping clothes, and warming my chilled limbs be-fore a glowing grate, in a room which was the very picture of ecclesiastical repose and gravity.

" The vicar was of bulk and thews,
Six feet he stood within his shoes,
And every inch of all a man;
Ecciesiast on the ancient plan,
Unforced by any party rule
His native character to school;
In ancient learning not unread,
But had few doctrines in his head;
Dissenters truly he abhorred,
They never had his gracious word.
He ne'er was bitter or unkind,
But positively spoke his mind.
Their piety he could not bear,
A sneaking, snivelling set they were:
Their tricks and meanness fired his blood;
Up for his Church he stoutly stood.
No worldly aim had he in life
To set him with himself at strife."

The description of Arthur Hugh Clough's, might in essentials apply to the bulky and dignified man who had thus received me out of the wild storm into his hospitable house. It was indeed a sudden transition. The comfortable though austere parlor, in which my entertainer and myself sat during the evening, while the tempest raved without, was hung with pictures of old Catholic subjects and saints ; a mediaeval brass-bound coffer stood on the centre-table to hold valuable papers ; bits of painted glass, and plans for church architecture, were upon the mantel-piece and scattered about the room ; and a large case of books filled up one end. Most of these books were the works of the French Jansenists, and came from the original Port Royal library. They were bequeathed to Mr. A., as I understood him to say, by Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, the biographer of the Port Royalists. Such little marks would at once indicate something of the religious status and character of my excellent host, but they would by no means tell all ; nor do I feel myself permitted to tell all and yet I do not think a man like Mr. A. would be annoyed by the mention of some of his peculiar ecclesiastical views, which are well known, and which illustrate one phase of the religious condition of England at the present time.

A man of high culture and powerful mind he had aspired to something more than intellectual eminence. He aimed at a life of exclusive devotion to the higher truths of Faith and the Divine life. There was a strong infusion of the mystic, and even ascetic element, coloring and shading his hearty religious sympathies. He believed in widely different and progressive spheres of spiritual attainment ; that all men were not capable of the highest spirituality, and that perhaps this distinction would forever exist. There were some who were called a a life of exclusive consecration to, and of purer union with the All-Perfect. They were chosen spirits, men who, like Paul, despised their material nature, denied themselves the delights of taste, and whose spirits were continual temples of God ; hey were the select priests of God ; they were the peculiar media of His transmitted Spirit. He believed in this true Apostolic succession, and was an earnest supporter of the Tractarian view of the Church, the order of its ministry, the comprehensiveness of its service, and the vital efficacy of its sacraments. He declared decidedly, that the only hope of the Church of England, and of England in a religious point of view, lay in the Puseyite wing of the Church; not in the unconverted portion of it, who only formed the skeleton and dry bones, but in those whom God's Spirit had renewed. They were fitted, he said, by their legal education, their lives of self-denial and self-mastery, to endure hardness, as good soldiers of Jesus Christ, and were like John the Baptist, coming up out of the wilderness, to proclaim the advent of the true Light. They were men, hardy, single-eyed, Ind able to do men's work, And they held the only true conception of the Church of God. He had learned this truth through much strife and affliction. He had once been an evangelist, going here and there, preaching as he pleased and where he pleased. He had thought that all men shared equally God's Spirit. But he had been drawn to the truth of the visible unity of the Church, — that it must be somewhere. If it were in Rome, he determined to go there. It was, he found by searching and prayer, where one Spirit is given in baptism by the hands of one chosen body of anointed ministers, forming one visible Church of Christ in the world. He then turned to the English Church, speaking of it with enthusiasm as a Church of the true order, as in fact the Apostolic Church, having an organic life from the earliest times, and possessing the true signs of a primitive foundation of God : — but I will not continue this particular conversation, excepting to say that while abhorring schismatics of all denominations, he held strongly to the Methodist theory of reformations or revivals of religion. He went to the extreme lengths of the most earnest Methodist in this respect ; indeed he seemed to be a mixture of Pusey and Wesley. Yet one word more as to his religious opinions — for the man and his conversation awoke in me an absorbing interest.

The English Prayer-Book, he considered, pre-supposed conversion, and the Sacraments fed the life begun at conversion. He was a staunch sacramentarian, but ever in a high and spiritual sense. He thought it to be his special work to convert the High Church party of England to a more spiritual view of divine things ; and he had solemnly devoted to this work his two sons, noble young men, with one of whom I became acquainted, the other being in Scotland on a preaching tour, though still an undergraduate at Oxford. These self-denying preachers of righteousness coming up out of the desert and grasping the kingdom of Heaven with power, they were the ones who would shake England, and arouse her from her sins to a higher life.

The next Sabbath morning I was awakened by the stentorian voices of the Cornwall miners, and of the humble people of his congregation, who were assembled in a lower room to pray ; and certainly such prayers I have never heard before or since. It was like the roaring of lions ; it was storming the throne of grace ; it was wrestling, pleading before the hills, agonizing, crying, almost shouting to God, that He might come and help them. — The little church where Divine service was held was built after the model of the one at Iona. Its bare white internal walls were decorated by drawings roughly executed, though with some spirit, by young Puseyite clergymen, as Mr. A. told me, who had from time to time visited him ; there were copies of Albrecht Dόrer's " Christ in the Wilderness ;" Ary Scheffer's " Christ rescuing the Lamb ; " Bruno's " St. Peter ; " &c. Texts of Scripture, and symbolical scrolls and ornaments, were also added, and the whole aspect of the church, the draped altar, the intoning of the Liturgy, the kneeling of the priest at the altar, were almost, if not quite, in the Roman Catholic fashion. Mr. A. preached two powerful sermons, the one in the morning upon " the Marriage Supper," which feast, he said, was Spiritual Joy, of which all should strive to partake, and it was not Justification or Righteousness, which many would make of it. During the preaching in the afternoon, as the storm grew more furious without and the church more gloomy within, and the deep tones of the preacher's voice, rising sometimes into start-ling loudness, mingled with the tremendous blasts of the wind, and with the sobs and groans of the poor miners, who sometimes threw up their arms wildly into the air in the ecstasy of their emotion, — it was assuredly a strange and solemn scene. Mr. A., speaking of the church itself, called it the spiritual birthplace of many noble and distinguished persons ; and he pointed out the very seats they had occupied when their hearts were touched. He appeared to me a kind of English Louis Harms, in his rugged individuality and imperious dogmatism, mingled as they were with deep, simple, primitive piety. He ruled his rocky vicarate at Land's End with a monarch's sway.

The generous hospitality of Mr. A. and his family to myself, a perfect stranger, was something which seemed to me beautiful, and which I can never for-get. He is certainly a man whose earnestness and profound consecration to his Master's work cannot be doubted, if one cannot agree with him in all his views. He repudiates with scorn the idea of being considered to be the leader of a sect in the English Church, as there has been some attempt on the part of his admirers and disciples to make of him. But my good host was, I think, at fault in his confident estimate of the power of the High Church movement. Tractarianisin has spent its force. At one time, inspired by the genius of Newman, the learning of Pusey, and the sweet music of Keble's song, it was mighty, but it has already had its day, and now lives only in the puerilities of Ritualism. That which was true in it has been dragged down and overwhelmed by that which was false. It has failed to Orientalize the English Church, or to change England into a happy mediaeval land, rejoicing in the sound of the convent bell. We would not say that it has done no good, but it has striven to set up the dead form of the Church, before the living Christ ; it has denied the rights of individual conscience and reason, and it cannot thus hope to control and lead English mind. The reaction of this, in the main untrue, though in some respects learned and refined ecclesiasticism manifesting many traits of the noblest unselfishness, is rending anew the English Church, and armed powers, strong to contend against the truth, and the very life of the Christian faith, have sprung up from the sowing of the dragon's teeth. I believe, however, in the essential truth of Mr. A.'s idea of the visible unity of the Christian Church. The best minds in Christendom have always pleaded for unity ; but it is not in the form in which Mr. A. puts it. It is not in uniformity of order, government, or worship, but in this, that the true Church is the true brotherhood of man, and all who love Christ, who hold to the Head, shall love one another, and shall know one another, not theoretically and invisibly, but visibly and openly ; they shall not oppose and wound each other ; they shall be as in the primitive times one in deed and in truth, working together with gladness to recover the world to God. " There is one body and one spirit " — this great truth is superior to Protestantism, or Catholicism, or any other Churchism. There is an ideal unity toward which all should ever tend and strive, but that this ideal unity shall ever be perfectly and concretely realized on earth, we have more doubt about, and can hardly believe. After all we would be chary to condemn the earnest strivings and methods of any who sincerely profess to love and serve Christ on earth ; and I must confess that the few " High Church " clergymen in whose society I have happened to be thrown, though I could not agree with them at all in their views, were person-ally by far the most scholar-like, refined, and interesting men of all the English clergymen whom I met.

Having now reached the " Land's End " of England, both physical and spiritual, let us turn around and retrace our course northward, until in the neighborhood of Bristol we come upon our former steps, and thus will have completed the cireuit of this little land, little in area, but vast in crowded interest and power.