It Was, Of Course, Not Right; It Was
Indecent To Laugh On Such An Occasion, For We Were Not Of
The
ebullient sort who go to "The Stones" at three o'clock in the
morning "for a lark"; but it was
Very natural in the
circumstances, and mentally I laughed myself at the absurdity
of the situation. However, the laugher had been rebuked for
his levity, and this incident over, there was nothing further
to disturb me or any one in our solemn little gathering.
It was a very sweet experience, and I cannot say that my early
morning outing would have been equally good at any other
lonely spot on Salisbury Plain or anywhere else with a wide
starry sky above me, the flush of dawn in the east, and the
larks rising heavenward out of the dim misty earth. Those
rudely fashioned immemorial stones standing dark and large
against the pale clear moonlit sky imparted something to the
feeling. I sat among them alone and had them all to myself,
as the others, fearing to tear their clothes on the barbed
wire, had not ventured to follow me when I got through the
fence. 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. Taken to
Stonehenge, she had a vision of a great gathering of people,
and so real did they seem that she believed in the reality
of it all, and so beautiful did they appear to her that she
was reluctant to leave, and begged to be taken back to see
it all again. Unfortunately it is not true. A full and
careful inquiry has been made into the story, of which there
are several versions, and its origin traced to a little
story-telling Wiltshire boy who had read or heard of the
white-robed priests of the ancient days at "The Stones," and
who just to astonish other little boys naughtily pretended
that he had seen it all himself!
Chapter Twenty-Three: Following a River
The stream invites us to follow: the impulse is so common that
it might be set down as an instinct; and certainly there is no
more fascinating pastime than to keep company with a river
from its source to the sea. Unfortunately this is not easy in
a country where running waters have been enclosed, which
should be as free as the rain and sunshine to all, and were
once free, when England was England still, before landowners
annexed them, even as they annexed or stole the commons and
shut up the footpaths and made it an offence for a man to go
aside from the road to feel God's grass under his feet. Well,
they have also got the road now, and cover and blind and choke
us with its dust and insolently hoot-hoot at us. Out of the
way, miserable crawlers, if you don't want to be smashed!
Sometimes the way is cut off by huge thorny hedges and fences
of barbed wire - man's devilish improvement on the bramble
- brought down to the water's edge.
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