Outside The Enclosure They Were Some Distance From Me,
And As They Talked In Subdued Tones, Their Voices Reached Me
As a low murmur - a sound not out of harmony with the silent
solitary spirit of the place; and there
Was now no other sound
except that of a few larks singing fitfully a long way off.
Just what the element was in that morning's feeling which
Stonehenge contributed I cannot say. It was too vague and
uncertain, too closely interwoven with the more common feeling
for nature. No doubt it was partly due to many untraceable
associations, and partly to a thought, scarcely definite
enough to be called a thought, of man's life in this land from
the time this hoary temple was raised down to the beginning of
history. A vast span, a period of ten or more, probably of
twenty centuries, during which great things occurred and great
tragedies were enacted, which seem all the darker and more
tremendous to the mind because unwritten and unknown. But
with the mighty dead of these blank ages I could not commune.
Doubtless they loved and hated and rose and fell, and there
were broken hearts and broken lives; but as beings of flesh
and blood we cannot visualize them, and are in doubt even as
to their race. And of their minds, or their philosophy of
life, we know absolutely nothing. We are able, as Clifford
has said in his Cosmic Emotion, to shake hands with the
ancient Greeks across the great desert of centuries which
divides our day from theirs; but there is no shaking hands
with these ancients of Britain - or Albion, seeing that we are
on the chalk. To our souls they are as strange as the
builders of Tiuhuanaco, or Mitla and Itzana, and the cyclopean
ruins of Zimbabwe and the Carolines.
It is thought by some of our modern investigators of psychic
phenomena that apparitions result from the coming out of
impressions left in the surrounding matter, or perhaps in the
ether pervading it, especially in moments of supreme agitation
or agony. The apparition is but a restored picture, and
pictures of this sort are about us in millions; but for our
peace they are rarely visible, as the ability to see them is
the faculty of but a few persons in certain moods and certain
circumstances. Here, then, if anywhere in England, we, or the
persons who are endowed with this unpleasant gift, might look
for visions of the time when Stonehenge was the spiritual
capital, the Mecca of the faithful (when all were that), the
meeting-place of all the intellect, the hoary experience, the
power and majesty of the land.
But no visions have been recorded. It is true that certain
stories of alleged visions have been circulated during the
last few years. One, very pretty and touching, is of a child
from the London slums who saw things invisible to others.
This was one of the children of the very poor, who are taken
in summer and planted all about England in cottages to have a
week or a fortnight of country air and sunshine.
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