We Have Heard Of Stonehenge In Our
Childhood Or Boyhood - That Great Building Of Unknown Origin
And Antiquity, Its Circles Of Stones, Some Still Standing,
Others Lying Prostrate, Like The Stupendous Half-Shattered
Skeleton Of A Giant Or Monster Whose Stature Reached To The
Clouds.
It stands, we read or were told, on Salisbury Plain.
To my uninformed, childish mind a plain anywhere was
Like the
plain on which I was born - an absolutely level area stretching
away on all sides into infinitude; and although the effect is
of a great extent of earth, we know that we actually see very
little of it, that standing on a level plain we have a very
near horizon. On this account any large object appearing on
it, such as a horse or tree or a big animal, looks very much
bigger than it would on land with a broken surface.
Oddly enough, my impossible Stonehenge was derived from a
sober description and an accompanying plate in a sober work
- a gigantic folio in two volumes entitled "A New System of
Geography", dated some time in the eighteenth century. How
this ponderous work ever came to be out on the pampas, over
six thousand miles from the land of its origin, is a thing to
wonder at. I remember that the Stonehenge plate greatly
impressed me and that I sacrilegiously cut it out of the book
so as to have it!
Now we know, our reason tells us continually, that the mental
pictures formed in childhood are false because the child and
man have different standards, and furthermore the child mind
exaggerates everything; nevertheless, such pictures persist
until the scene or object so visualized is actually looked
upon and the old image shattered.
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