The little coves with blue-grey floors wreathed with sea-foam; the splintered and contorted rock; the curved strata, which here bend over like exposed ribs of a mighty mammoth; the sharp skerries that run out into the sea to torment it into eddies of froth and spray—are of rare wildness and beauty. It is impossible to stand on these cliffs, and not cite the ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα, παμμῆτόρ τε γῆ of the poet. If this were quoted in the ears of the vicar of Morwenstow, he would stop, lay his hand on one’s arm and say— “How do you translate that?” “‘The many-twinkling smile of ocean.’” “I thought so. So does every one else. But it is wrong,” with emphasis—“utterly wrong. Listen to me. Prometheus is bound, held backwards, with brazen fetters binding him to the rock. He cannot see the waters, cannot note their smiles. He gazes up into the sky above him. But he hears. Notice how Æschylus describes the sounds that reach his ears, not the sights. Above, indeed, is the ‘divine æther’; he is looking into that, and he hears the fanning of the ’swift-winged breezes,’ and the murmur and splash of the ‘fountains of rivers’; and then comes the passage which I translate, ‘The loud laugh of ocean waves.’” A little way down the side of the hill that descends in gorse banks and broken rock and clean precipice to one of the largest and grandest of the caves, is a hut made of fragments of wrecked ships thrown up on this shore. The sides are formed of curved ribs of vessels, and the entrance ornamented with carved work from a figure-head. This hut was made by Mr. Hawker himself; and in it he would sit, sheltered from storm, and look forth over the wild sea, dreaming, composing poetry, or watching ships scudding before the gale dangerously near the coast. It was in this hut that most of his great poem, “The Quest of the Sangreal,” was composed. A friend says: “I often visited him whilst this poem was in process of composition, and sat with him in this hut as he recited it. I shall never forget one wild evening, when the sun had gone down before our eyes as a ball of red-hot iron into the deep. He had completed ‘The Quest of the Sangreal,’ and he repeated it from memory to me. He had a marvellous power of recitation, and with his voice, action and pathos, threw a life into the words which vanishes in print. I cannot forget the close of the poem, with the throbbing sea before me, and Tintagel looming out of the water to the south:— He ceased, and all around was dreamy night; There stood Dundagel, throned; and the great sea Lay, a strong vassal at his master’s gate, And, like a drunken giant, sobbed in sleep. On a rushy knoll, in a moor in the parish of Morwenstow, rises the Tamar,[15] and from the same mount flows the Torridge.