only softened with diaphanous rings of cirrus-cloud, when the moss glistens on the rocks and the expanse of meadowland is a vivid carpet of green, when the winding hilly lanes flanked by tall hedges are white and shadowless, and the little tinkling runlets are silver gleams, and then this tract of Arthur’s Cornwall is almost the land of faerie which poets have sung. [Illustration: _Photo: R. Webber, Boscastle_] THE ELEPHANT ROCK, BOSSINEY COVE [_To face p. 102_] What more fitting than that the grave of Tristram and Iseult should have been at Tintagel, where the sea they loved came with its strong and awful tides, and now “Sweeps above their coffined bones In the wrecked chancel by the shivered shrine”? The deep sea guards them and engirds them, and no man shall say where the lovers lie in their last sleep. King Mark buried the two in one grave, and planted over it a rose-bush and vine, the branches of which so intermingled that they became inseparable. Arnold, Swinburne, and Tennyson have best told the whole story in our language in modern times. But it is no slight task to trace the literary history and development of the beautiful theme. A German minnesänger of the twelfth century, Gotfrit of Strasburg, is the first to whom the romance is ascribed, though Scott and others have claimed for Thomas of Ercildoune (Thomas the Rhymer) the best poetic version, only one copy of which is extant. A thirteenth-century manuscript, which contains a French metrical version of the romance, has been noted by Lockhart as citing the authority of Thomas the Rhymer for the story of Tristram and Iseult; but Thomas’s version was totally different from the prose romances. Great efforts have been made at one time and another to prove the story to be of English, French, and German origin, but at least this much is assured--the principal scenes are English, and the leading events in the history of Tristram, the nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, occur at Tintagel. He journeyed to Ireland to bring back the daughter of the queen of that country, and he journeyed to Brittany to bring back his own wife, that Iseult of the White Hand who failed to win his love. His adventures as a Knight of the Round Table took him, as was usual, over much territory and to foreign lands; but it is to Cornwall that the interest always returns, and in which it is concentrated. Among the “wind-hollowed heights and gusty bays” of Tintagel, and within the “towers washed round with rolling foam,” the knight and the damsel wedded to King Mark, who had saved him from torture and death, lived their lives of forbidden love. The Minstrel-knight suited his voice to the mellow chords of his harp, and wandered about the woods and beside the sea in the May-time of his happiness with Iseult the Queen. And when the knight had wedded another Iseult, it was at Tintagel that Mark’s wife, with her passionate thoughts, her sorrow, and her despair, sat alone in a casement and heard the night