At such time Tintagel is telling its own story, weaving its own romance; and words seem vain when those shattered columns, those fallen walls, that unbridged chasm, are there to make the tale. Of the after-history of the place what matters it? We would fain have the story end, as it began, with Arthur and Guinevere, King Mark, Mage Merlin, and Tristram and Iseult. Every roll of the breakers is a voice from the past, and every crumbling chamber a chapter in that history which only the true poet transcribes. Yet even while such thoughts are forcing themselves upon the mind of the beholder of a typical August sunset over Tintagel, the end of the day will be near. The arc of the sun blazes upon the sea-line, an edge of fiery carmine, and a fleecy train of cirrus-cloud crimsons with the last rays. Slowly and yet perceptibly the light dies away and leaves the heaving sea mystically dusk and the world full of shadows. Darkness looms over Tintagel. The overhanging crags look as if they might crack, break off, and thunder down into the open-mouthed sea below. The black chough wheels about the ruins--the spirit of Arthur, say the people, revisiting the scene of his glory. Arcturus, the star of Arthur, glistens in the blue sky right over the castle height, and Arthur’s Harp shapes itself more dimly further east--for the constellations themselves were named after the puissant king. The tide is at its height and has flooded the little stony beach to which a steep path leads; the caves are full; on the horizon the night-clouds come up and shape themselves into fantastic forms of towers, and the real which are near, and the imagined which are far, scarce can be distinguished. [Illustration: _Photo: R. Webber, Boscastle_] BARRAS HEAD, TINTAGEL [_To face p. 110_] Lytton seems to have had Tintagel, or a very similar place in the north, in his mind when he described the arrival of the Cymrian King, pursued by the Saxons, at a beach of far resounding seas where wave-hollowed caves arched, and “Column and vault, and seaweed-dripping domes Long vistas opening through the streets of dark, Seem’d like a city’s skeleton, the homes Of giant races vanish’d.”