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.
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