In Cornwall and Across the Sea :: :: University of Virginia Library

He, whom the Muse beguiles, doth seldom note
The flight of time or covering of space,
But rambles on with absent-minded face,
Oft with light tread, though blistered be his foot
His body weary and his goal remote;
The mind's impatience wearies more than pace;
And he who feeds or lulls his mind, can brace
A weary frame to task too heavy put.
I had been climbing all a summer day:
Over rough Cornish moors had been my roam:
Jaded and footsore was I, far from home,
And thrice as far it seemed to lie away,
When suddenly the Muse spoke, and I sped
As lightly home as though enchantment-led.

II.

The Cornish moors! what visions raise they not
Of fairies, pixies, giants, knights, and kings?
For here the latest fairies danced their rings
And pixies lurked in every lonely spot
To lure the traveller: and giants wrote
Their history in stones whose vastness sings,
As never minstrel might who harped on strings,
The giants' mighty lives. Here Tristram smote
In his first fight, and Arthur in his last
Beside the slaughterous bridge of Camelford
After the power of his knights had passed,
And here the loyal Cornishmen have poured
Times out of mind their blood in any cause
Which seemed to simple folk for Nature's laws.

CASTLE CHUN.

I.

A mighty ring of granite stones, unhewn,
Like beaches raised by the Atlantic tide
On Cornish coasts, a brambled moat outside,
And, bounding that, a giant's wall—half strewn,
Half indestructible—are Castle Chûn.
Within it is one carpet, fairy-dyed,
Of heather-crimson and gorse-gold allied,
Fern-fringed with green. Late on an afternoon
We scaled the castle-hill: the sun had gone,
But on the ruins of long-vanished pride
The haze of the departed godhead shone,
So lately 'neath horizon did he glide.
Was it not meet? His rays would have revealed
The ravages his haze did fondly shield.

II.

Glorious it were to spend a summer night,—
A sweet soft night in June,—within these walls,
Listening to distant owl and curlew calls,
And conjuring up a vision of the fight,
Which strewed the moor, a cloth-yard arrow's flight,
With barrow, cist, and cromlech. What appals
The ignorant and timid only thralls
The lover of the mystic with delight.
Giant or fay were no unwelcome guest,
Or ghost of Norseman, or Round-Table knight
Still of the phantom Sangreal in quest.
If such there came, might not there come a sight
Of the huge castle in its ancient pride,—
High-walled, deep-moated, and with kings inside?

III.

It weighs but little in the poet's mind
By whom 'twas reared—the dark Euskarian
(Who named us “Britons,” our primæval man,)
Against the Celt, or by the Celt designed
To stay the Teuton conqueror and find
Brief respite from the Viking. If blood ran
In great old battles, if for long months' span
'Twas resolutely held, when hope had pined,
And food had wasted, it is haunted ground;
Even if a bandit, preying on his kind,
In these stupendous stones a fastness found.
It matters not who stone to stone doth bind.
Castles we love as stages where great plays
By famous men were acted in old days.

RIALOBRAN, THE SON OF CUNOVAL.

Rialobran, the Son of Cunoval,
This is inscribed in Latin on a stone,
Rough hewn and rudely lettered, standing lone
Beneath Carn Galva. Was he general
Or hero? Did he valiantly fall
Fighting the Saxon? Did wild women moan
Over a bulwark of the people gone?
Why shared he not the common fate of all,
Who lived and died and were forgotten here,
That his one stone the moors of Penwith hold,
Gay-gardened at the season of the year
With bramble-fruit, heath-purple, and gorse-gold,
And with two castles of his ancient race
Guarding in ruined pride his burial place.