The very mention of Cornish seas has an alluring sound, and one already feels in the realm of romance when he descries in the mellow light of an afternoon in late summer that smallest of villages perched upon a rock overlooking the bluest of seas with its perpetual fringe of powdery foam. Here at the edge of the Atlantic is a most beguiling stretch of water, filling innumerable bays--water so clear and calm and deep-hued far away that it is hard to realise that it makes a cruel and treacherous sea in which only on the gentlest of days dare a swimmer plunge and feel his way among the underlying rocks, or upon the roaring waves of which dare a hardy sailor venture his boat. In storm this sea is terrible. The waves upheave themselves like solid hillocks of water, black at the base, and hurl themselves with appalling force against the huge rocks, which have already been worn and broken by them into a thousand fantastic shapes. Here and there the propelling force of the incoming tide, working like a gigantic engine, sends with torrent-force along narrow open passages a seething stream which beats its way upward and dashes headlong over the barriers of wood and stone; and the great smoke-coloured waves beyond rear themselves heavily, topple, and crash down into the abyss with thunderous roaring. On they come, nearer and nearer, louder and louder, those hard, rising, climbing, dissolving bodies of incalculable strength, dashing themselves furiously over every obstacle, sweeping with a hiss across the tracts of sand, and obliterating the tall rocks which can be toilsomely climbed when the waters retreat. Beneath this raging, battering sea lies a fabled domain with all its fair cities and towers, and every watcher of those stupendous, merciless billows can realise their potentiality to tear away the land and drag it into the unseen deeps. Storm at Tintagel or Trebarwith is both revelation and conviction: it is a manifestation of remorselessness, a suggestion of irreparable ruin, desolation, and loss. Easy indeed is it to imagine that the treacherous and cruel waves driving rapaciously landward have already had their victory and are savagely seeking to extend their conquest, and that hereabout lie “the sad sea-sounding wastes of Lyonnesse.” No one has described this wildly beautiful sea with greater charm and realism than Swinburne, who has watched it in all moods, seen it in the blueness of calm, seen it strive and shiver “like spread wings of angels blown by the sun’s breath,” seen it when the glad exhilarated swimmer feels “The sharp sweet minute’s kiss Given of the wave’s lip, for a breath’s space curled And pure as at the daytime of the world,”