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Updated: June 17, 2025
I knew now where I was, and, laying down my stick and bundle, and taking off my hat, I advanced slowly, and cast myself it was folly, perhaps, but I could not help what I did cast myself, with my face on the dewy earth, in the middle of the portal of giants, beneath the transverse stone. The spirit of Stonehenge was strong upon me!
For, indeed, it cannot be denied that the state of things which this Play represents, is that with which the author's own experience was conversant; and that all the terrible tragic satire of it, points not to that age in the history of Britain in which the Druids were still responsible for the national culture, not to that time when the Celtic Triads, clothed with the sanctities of an unknown past, still made the standard works and authorities in learning, beyond which there was no going, not to the time when the national morality was still mystically produced at Stonehenge, in those national colleges, from whose mysterious rites the awful sanctities of the oak and the mistletoe drove back in confusion the sacrilegious inquirer, not to that time, but to the Elizabethan.
Dalliba should insist that it could not have been executed out of Italy. But Prof. Stonehenge was right too; it was a stone of the chalcedonic family, resembling sardonyx, except in color; others, similar to it both in a natural state and wrought into arrow-heads, had been found along the shores of Lake Superior.
From here he walked to Stonehenge and on to Salisbury, "inspecting the curiosities of the place," and endeavouring by sleep and good food to make up the wastage of the last few months. The weather was fine and his health and spirits rapidly improved as he tramped on, his "daily journeys varying from twenty to twenty-five miles."
The traveller Barth speaks of stone circles near Mourzouk and near the town of Tripoli. True dolmens do, however, occur in Tripoli, and Cooper figures a fine monument at Messa in the Cyrenaica, which appears to consist of a single straight line of tall uprights with a continuous entablature of blocks similar to that of the outer circle at Stonehenge.
When we reached the spot, we found a picnic-party just finishing their dinner, on one of the overthrown stones of the druidical temple; and within the sacred circle an artist was painting a wretched daub of the scene, and an old shepherd the very Shepherd of Salisbury Plain sat erect in the centre of the ruin. There never was a ruder thing than Stonehenge made by mortal hands.
On Salisbury Plain, Stonehenge yet stands: a monument of the earlier time when the Roman name was unknown in Britain, and when the Druids, with their best magic wands, could not have written it in the sands of the wild sea-shore. The Romans had scarcely gone away from Britain, when the Britons began to wish they had never left it.
The burial of the paved and level path on my lawn, which took place under my own observation, is an analogous case. Even those parts of the concrete floor which the worms could not penetrate would almost certainly have been undermined, and would have sunk, like the great stones at Leith Hill Place and Stonehenge, for the soil would have been damp beneath them.
Bowles contends again that the pyramids of Egypt are poetical because of "the association with boundless deserts," and that a "pyramid of the same dimensions" would not be sublime in "Lincoln's-Inn-Fields": not so poetical certainly; but take away the "pyramids," and what is the "desert"? Take away Stonehenge from Salisbury Plain, and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath, or any other uninclosed down.
I thought it would have been better in this case if the priest had chosen to preach on Stonehenge and had said that he devoutly wished we were sun-worshippers, like the Persians, as well as Christians; also that we were Buddhists, and worshippers of our dead ancestors like the Chinese, and that we were pagans and idolaters who bow down to sticks and stones, if all these added cults would serve to make us more reverent.
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