From the Lizard, the shores pass northward and westward, and gradually losing, as they proceed, their harsh and untamed features, swell into sloping sweeps of richly cultivated land, and into hills glowing with the freshest verdure. As the coast advances, and at the same time spreads itself southward, it unites to its luxuriant richness a bolder character, and, rising like a vast amphitheatre, it opposes a barrier to western storms, while it presents its undulating bosom to the sun, and collecting his rays, pours them again with multiplied effect, upon every part of the surrounding country. The shores now pass westward, and extend to the _Land's End_, in their approach to which they become more rocky and precipitous, and occasionally exhibit some of the finest cliff scenery in the island, displaying by splendid natural sections the exact structure and relations of the rocks of which the country is composed. The western shores are sprinkled with picturesque villages, churches, cottages, and villas; and near the eastern margin of the bay, a pile of rocks, supporting a venerable chapel on its summit, starts abruptly from the waves, and presents an appearance of a most singular and beautiful description--this is _Saint Michael's Mount_, an eminence equally celebrated in the works of the poet, the naturalist, the antiquary, and the historian. If we pursue the coast, and, turning round the western extremity of our island, trace its outline as it proceeds northerly, and then easterly to the _Bay of St. Ives_, a very different country presents itself; instead of the undulating curves, and luxuriant herbage of the southern shores, the land is generally high,--the vallies short, narrow, and quick of descent, and the whole landscape affords a scene of incomparable cheerlessness; on the summit of almost every hill the granite is to be seen protruding its rugged forms in the most fantastic shapes, while the neighbouring ground is frequently covered for some distance with its disjointed and gigantic fragments, tumbled together in magnificent confusion; scarcely a shrub is seen to diversify the waste, and the traveller who undertakes to explore the more desolate parts of the district, will feel as if he were walking over the ruins of the globe, and were the only being who had survived the general wreck; and yet Ulysses was not more attached to his Ithaca, than is the Cornish peasant to his wild and cheerless dwelling. "Dear is that shed to which his soul conforms, "And dear that hill which lifts him to the storms."