MIAKSPEARE CLIFF. 229
which you ascend, by an internal winding staircase, some two hundred steps. Light and air are conveyed to them by well-like apertures in the chalk, or by openings on the face of the cliffs ; and an intelligent traveller has said, that " the chimneys, coming up forty feet through the mountain, shoot out their smoke as if they were the flues of some Cyclopean artificers, whose forges were in the bowels of the earth."
Almost the whole of the three days spent in Dover were marked by wild winds and a tempest of rain. Our midnight music was the hoarse reverberations of the sea, smiting and broken against the rocks that guard the coast.
On an evening promenade to the Shakspeare Cliff, somewhat overrating our powers of adhesion, we came near being swept, by a tremendous blast, into the boil ing surges beneath. This rock, whose apex must be near six hundred feet, seems, even in its more accessi ble heights, to utter the words of him whose name it bears,
" How fearful, And dizzy tis, to cast one s eyes so low !
Half way down,
Hangs one who gathers samphire. Dreadful trade ! Methinks he seems no bigger than his head. Yon fishermen, that walk upon the beach, Appear as mice."
Dover Castle and its reminiscences of the vigilance with which the English troops here kept watch and
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