Stonehenge

the imposing remains of an ancient place, possibly of Druidical or even more ancient worship, nine miles north of Salisbury, England. A number of moss-grown stones, sixteen feet in height and six feet in thickness, stand on end in two rings, one within the other. The outer circle is 105 feet in diameter. Flat stone slabs lying across the tops still connect a few of the pillars. It is conjectured that the roof may at one time have been complete. At the center are the remains of an ellipitical altar or sacred spot where the priests possibly went through their mysteries while the people stood far without in a sort of public square. An earthen wall fifteen feet high, a ditch thirty feet wide, and an inner wall surround the whole with a single avenue by way of entrance. The avenue divides without, one branch leading to burial mounds, the other to the public place mentioned. Antiquarians are at a loss to assign the remains of Stonehenge as to time, purpose, or people.

We left the train at Salisbury and took a carriage to Amesbury, passing by Old Sarum, a bare, treeless hill, once containing the town which sent two members to Parliament--now, not a hut; and, arriving at Amesbury, stopped at the George Inn. After dinner we walked to Salisbury Plain. On the broad downs, under the gray sky, not a house was visible, nothing but Stonehenge, which looked like a group of brown dwarfs in the wide expanse,--Stonehenge and the barrows, which rose like green bosses about the plain, and a few hayricks. On the top of a mountain the old temple would not be more impressive. Far and wide a few shepherds with their flocks sprinkled the plain, and a bagman drove along the road. It looked as if the wide margin given in this crowded isle to this primeval temple were accorded by the veneration of the British race to the old egg out of which all their ecclesiastical structures and history had proceeded. Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with a diameter of a hundred feet, and enclosing a second and third colonnade within. We walked around the stones and clambered over them, to wont ourselves with their strange aspect and groupings, and found a nook sheltered from the wind among them, where Carlyle lighted his cigar. It was pleasant to see that just this simplest of all simple structures--two upright stones and a lintel laid across--had long outstood all later churches and all history, and were like what is most permanent on the face of the planet; these, and the barrows--mere mounds (of which there are a hundred and sixty within a circle of three miles about Stonehenge), like the same mound on the plain of Troy, which still makes good to the passing mariner on Hellespont the vaunt of Homer and the fame of Achilles. Within the enclosure grow buttercups, nettles; and all around, wild thyme, daisy, meadowsweet, goldenrod, thistle, and the carpeting grass. Over us, larks were soaring and singing,--as my friend said, "the larks which were hatched last year, and the wind which was hatched many thousand years ago." We counted and measured by paces the biggest stones, and soon knew as much as any man can suddenly know of the inscrutable temple. There are ninety-four stones, and there were once probably one hundred and sixty. The temple is circular and uncovered, and the situation fixed astronomically,--the grand entrances, here and at Abury, being placed exactly northeast, "as all the gates of the old cavern temples are." How came these stones here? For these sarsens, or Druidical sandstones, are not found in this neighborhood. The sacrificial stone, as it is called, is the only one in all these blocks that can resist the action of fire, and, as I read in the books, must have been brought one hundred fifty miles.--Emerson, English Traits.