Cold is the Druid’s altar-stone,
     Its vanished flame no more returns;
  But ours no chilling damp has known,—­
     Unchanged, unchanging, still it burns.

  So let our broken circle stand
     A wreck, a remnant, yet the same,
  While one last, loving, faithful hand
     Still lives to feed its altar-flame!

My heart has gone back over the waters to my old friends and my own home.  When this vision has faded, I will return to the silence of the lovely Close and the shadow of the great Cathedral.

V.

The remembrance of home, with its early and precious and long-enduring friendships, has intruded itself among my recollections of what I saw and heard, of what I felt and thought, in the distant land I was visiting.  I must return to the scene where I found myself when the suggestion of the broken circle ran away with my imagination.

The literature of Stonehenge is extensive, and illustrates the weakness of archaeologists almost as well as the “Praetorium” of Scott’s “Antiquary.”  “In 1823,” says a local handbook, “H.  Browne, of Amesbury, published ‘An Illustration of Stonehenge and Abury,’ in which he endeavored to show that both of these monuments were antediluvian, and that the latter was formed under the direction of Adam.  He ascribes the present dilapidated condition of Stonehenge to the operation of the general deluge; for, he adds, ’to suppose it to be the work of any people since the flood is entirely monstrous.’”

We know well enough how great stones—­pillars and obelisks—­are brought into place by means of our modern appliances.  But if the great blocks were raised by a mob of naked Picts, or any tribe that knew none of the mechanical powers but the lever, how did they set them up and lay the cross-stones, the imposts, upon the uprights?  It is pleasant, once in a while, to think how we should have managed any such matters as this if left to our natural resources.  We are all interested in the make-shifts of Robinson Crusoe.  Now the rudest tribes make cords of some kind, and the earliest, or almost the earliest, of artificial structures is an earth-mound.  If a hundred, or hundreds, of men could drag the huge stones many leagues, as they must have done to bring them to their destined place, they could have drawn each of them up a long slanting mound ending in a sharp declivity, with a hole for the foot of the stone at its base.  If the stone were now tipped over, it would slide into its place, and could be easily raised from its slanting position to the perpendicular.  Then filling in the space between the mound and two contiguous stones, the impost could be dragged up to its position.  I found a pleasure in working at this simple mechanical problem, as a change from the more imaginative thoughts suggested by the mysterious monuments.