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.