Boscastle was so attractive that the rest of a long journey had to be performed in haste. Bodmin, Truro, Redruth, were all rapidly passed, and after climbing Carnbrea, near the latter town, and hearing some of the marvellous stories connected with that giant hill, we took rail for Penzance, anxious at least to visit St. Michael's Mount, the Logan Rock and the Land's End. But what impressed us most, when we reached that last and prettiest of Cornish towns, was the climate. We had believed it spring; but here it was already summer! The last struggle with wintry frosts was over, and the woods and fields were decked with all their wealth of verdure; the air had lost its sharpness, and the rich colouring of every part of the scene, from the golden furze upon the hills to the ruddy lichen on the rocks, seemed to reflect the genial glow. Mount's Bay, still and blue, was wonderful in its contrast with the Atlantic surges that we had just left on the opposite shore. We thought of the words with which Emerson begins one of his lectures: "In this refulgent summer it has been a luxury to live."
St. Michael's Mount, that extraordinary combination, geologically speaking, of granite and clay-slate, remarkable, too, in its correspondence with the much larger Mont St. Michel on the shore of Normandy, is as interesting a place to visit as it is beautiful to look upon. The views from its summit over sea and land are of surpassing loveliness, and to enjoy them to the full it is not necessary to make the hazardous attempt to sit in "St. Michael's Chair," the half, it is said, of an old stone lantern, but overhanging the precipice in a very perilous way. The villagers round the bay will tell you that the archangel himself appears in this "chair" when a storm is raging, and firmly believe that he is the guardian spirit of these seas.
The Logan Rock, to which we next directed our steps, was disappointing in more ways than one: the finest part of the cliff-scenery being the great granite headland, which visitors are apt to pass unnoticed, in searching for the natural curiosity, and in recalling the story of its fall and reinstatement. There are, in fact, many "logan" or logging rocks in granite districts, locally called Tolmêns; one formerly in the parish of Constantine, between Penrhyn and Helston, being larger than this on the coast, though without its magnificent accessories. Their peculiar position is caused by the influence of air and moisture, wearing a fissure in the rock, until a detached upper portion rests only on a small central base. The wonder is in the bigness of the rock thus balanced, and in the evenness of the process of disintegration all around: the vast majority of boulders worn away by such agencies being of course over balanced, so as to fall on one side.