Thence the Coquet descends in many a winding by scenes of the richest sylvan loveliness to Warkworth, renowned for its hermitage, which is still, as the old Percy ballad describes it, "deep hewn within a craggy cliff, and overhung with wood." And so we reach the sea, where Coquet Island, with its lighthouse, lies amid the gleaming waters, scarcely suggesting, as we gaze upon it in the fair sunshine, how terribly the storm sometimes there rages, or how those dark rocks are chafed by the angry billows!
But for the full splendour of cliff and ocean scenery we journey still a little northward, and come to Dunstanborough Castle. Here a dark ridge of basalt rises in pillared form sheer from the sea, and in the words of Alarmion, "the whitening breakers," surging with ceaseless thunder into the caves which pierce the cliffs, "sound near,"
"As boiling through the rocks they roar On Dunstanborough's caverned shore."
The view from the "Lilburn's Tower" in this ruined castle, commanding landwards the broad purple moors, extending in many an undulation to the rounded Cheviots, glimmering blue in the distance, and looking seawards over the restless ocean, beating ever at the foot of the black columns, while sea-birds are ceaselessly wheeling in mid air with shrill outcries, not unfairly vies with the wild magnificence of Tintagel, as described in our earlier pages.
The two coast scenes are, perhaps, unequalled in the British Islands: the difference is that, while the Cornish scene lies in far-away seclusion, this of Northumberland is close by one of the chief lines of traffic, and within accessible distance of crowded populations. Yet even Cornwall is a great industrial centre. Its mining industries are never far away from us. Its wildest cliffs are pierced by shafts and adits leading down, as in the Botallack Mine, to labyrinthine passages far under the bed of the sea, where the miners can hear overhead the rush of the waves and the grinding together of the huge boulders.
We have now reached the limit of our purpose, which was to show how near to the doors of the million is some of the most striking scenery of our land. Else from Dunstanborough Castle we could have pursued our way northwards at least as far as Bamborough Castle, not so much for the sake of admiring its noble ramparts and towers--once a fortress, now a temple of charity--or of gazing again upon the glories of cliff and sea, as of looking out across the waters to those rocky isles which, in our own time, have witnessed one of those deeds of unconscious heroism which do honour to our nature. For it was from one of those sea-beaten crags that, on the 5th of September, 1838, Grace Darling set forth upon her errand of mercy amid the raging waters, to rescue the survivors of the shipwrecked Forfarshire. "Her musical name," it has been said, "is the burden of a beautiful story of that love of man which is the love of Christ translated into human language and deeds." Four years after that great exploit the brave and gentle maiden died of consumption, brought on, it is said, by a visit to her brother, keeper of the lighthouse on Coquet Island: but she has left among our island race an imperishable name. Let us conclude these random rovings by a visit to her monument in Bamborough churchyard. Her figure lies as it were in slumber, an oar upon her shoulder, beneath a Gothic canopy, within sight and hearing of the waves. On the bright day of our visit the waves were murmuring and sparkling far below: the craggy islets in the distance were touched with sunlight, and we turned away, reminded less of the heroism that braved the storm, than of the heavenly home and the everlasting rest. "I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea."