It had been agreed between my friend Mr. C. and me, that before I left
England we should make an excursion together to Stonehenge, which
neither of us had seen; and the project pleased my fancy with the double
attraction of the monument and the companion. It seemed a bringing
together of extreme points, to visit the oldest religious monument in
Britain in company with her latest thinker, and one whose influence may
be traced in every contemporary book. I was glad to sum up a little my
experiences, and to exchange a few reasonable words on the aspects of
England, with a man on whose genius I set a very high value, and who had
as much penetration, and as severe a theory of duty as any person in it.
On Friday, 7th July, we took the South-western Railway through Hampshire
to Salisbury, where we found a carriage to convey us to Amesbury. The
fine weather and my friend's local knowledge of Hampshire, in which he
is wont to spend a part of every summer, made the way short. There was
much to say, too, of the travelling Americans, and their usual objects
in London. I thought it natural that they should give some time to
works of art collected here, which they cannot find at home, and a
little to scientific clubs and museums, which, at this moment, make
London very attractive. But my philosopher was not contented. Art and
'high art' is a favorite target for his wit. "Yes, _Kunst_ is a great
delusion, and Goethe and Schiller wasted a great deal of good time on
it":--and he thinks he discovers that old Goethe found this out, and, in
his later writings, changed his tone. As soon as men begin to talk of
art, architecture, and antiquities, nothing good comes of it. He wishes
to go through the British Museum in silence, and thinks a sincere man
will see something, and say nothing. In these days, he thought, it
would become an architect to consult only the grim necessity, and say,
'I can build you a coffin for such dead persons as you are, and for such
dead purposes as you have, but you shall have no ornament.' For the
science, he had, if possible, even less tolerance, and compared the
savans of Somerset House to the boy who asked Confucius "how many stars
in the sky?" Confucius replied, "he minded things near him"; then said
the boy, "how many hairs are there in your eyebrows?" Confucius said,
"he didn't know and didn't care."
Still speaking of the Americans, C. complained that they dislike the
coldness and exclusiveness of the English, and run away to France, and
go with their countrymen, and are amused, instead of manfully staying in
London, and confronting Englishmen, and acquiring their culture, who
really have much to teach them.
I told C. that I was easily dazzled, and was accustomed to concede
readily all that an Englishman would ask; I saw everywhere in the
country proofs of sense and spirit, and success of every sort: I like
the people: they are as good as they are handsome; they have everything,
and can do everything: but meantime, I surely know, that, as soon as I
return to Massachusetts, I shall lapse at once into the feeling, which
the geography of America inevitably inspires, that we play the game with
immense advantage; that there and not here is the seat and centre of the
British race; and that no skill or activity can long compete with the
prodigious natural advantages of that country, in the hands of the same
race; and that England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be
contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children. But
this was a proposition which no Englishman of whatever condition can
easily entertain.
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 hay-ricks. 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 a third colonnade within. We
walked round 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 C. 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, meadow-sweet, golden-rod, 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 north-east, "as all the gates of the old
cavern temples are." How came the 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 and fifty miles.
On almost every stone we found the marks of the mineralogist's hammer
and chisel. The nineteen smaller stones of the inner circle are of
granite. I, who had just come from Professor Sedgwick's Cambridge
Museum of megatheria and mastodons, was ready to maintain that some
cleverer elephants or mylodonta had borne off and laid these rocks one
on another. Only the good beasts must have known how to cut a
well-wrought tenon and mortise, and to smooth the surface of some of the
stones. The chief mystery is, that any mystery should have been allowed
to settle on so remarkable a monument, in a country on which all the
muses have kept their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. We are not
yet too late to learn much more than is known of this structure. Some
diligent Fellowes or Layard will arrive, stone by stone, at the whole
history, by that exhaustive British sense and perseverance, so whimsical
in its choice of objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur
to the rabbits, whilst it opens pyramids, and uncovers Nineveh.
Stonehenge, in virtue of the simplicity of its plan, and its good
preservation, is as if new and recent; and, a thousand years hence, men
will thank this age for the accurate history it will yet eliminate. We
walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh look at the uncanny
stones. The old sphinx put our petty differences of nationality out of
sight. To these conscious stones we two pilgrims were alike known and
near. We could equally well revere their old British meaning. My
philosopher was subdued and gentle. In this quiet house of destiny, he
happened to say, "I plant cypresses wherever I go, and if I am in search
of pain, I cannot go wrong." The spot, the gray blocks, and their rude
order, which refuses to be disposed of, suggested to him the flight of
ages, and the succession of religious. The old times of England impress
C. much; he reads little, he says, in these last years, but "_Acta
Sanctorum_," the fifty-three volumes of which are in the "London
Library." He finds all English history therein. He can see, as he
reads, the old saint of Iona sitting there, and writing, a man to men.
The _Acta Sanctorum_ show plainly that the men of those times believed
in God, and in the immortality of the soul, as their abbeys and
cathedrals testify: now, even the puritanism is all gone. London is
pagan. He fancied that greater men had lived in England than any of her
writers; and, in fact, about the time when those writers appeared, the
last of these were already gone.
We left the mound in the twilight, with the design to return the next
morning, and coming back two miles to our inn, we were met by little
showers, and late as it was, men and women were out attempting to
protect their spread windrows. The grass grows rank and dark in the
showery England. At the inn, there was only milk for one cup of tea.
When we called for more, the girl brought us three drops. My friend was
annoyed who stood for the credit of an English inn, and still more, the
next morning, by the dog-cart, sole procurable vehicle, in which we were
to be sent to Wilton. I engaged the local antiquary, Mr. Brown, to go
with us to Stonehenge, on our way, and show us what he knew of the
"astronomical" and "sacrificial" stones. I stood on the last, and he
pointed to the upright, or rather, inclined stone, called the
"astronomical," and bade me notice that its top ranged with the
sky-line. "Yes." Very well. Now, at the summer solstice, the sun
rises exactly over the top of that stone, and, at the Druidical temple
at Abury, there is also an astronomical stone, in the same relative
positions.
In the silence of tradition, this one relation to science becomes an
important clew; but we were content to leave the problem, with the
rocks. Was this the "Giants' Dance" which Merlin brought from
Killaraus, in Ireland, to be Uther Pendragon's monument to the British
nobles whom Hengist slaughtered here, as Geoffrey of Monmouth relates?
or was it a Roman work, as Inigo Jones explained to King James; or
identical in design and style with the East Indian temples of the sun;
as Davies in the Celtic Researches maintains? Of all the writers,
Stukeley is the best. The heroic antiquary, charmed with the geometric
perfections of his ruin, connects it with the oldest monuments and
religion of the world, and, with the courage of his tribe, does not
stick to say, "the Deity who made the world by the scheme of
Stonehenge." He finds that the _cursus_[23] on Salisbury Plain
stretches across the downs, like a line of latitude upon the globe, and
the meridian line of Stonehenge passes exactly through the middle of
this _cursus_. But here is the high point of the theory: the Druids had
the magnet; laid their courses by it; their cardinal points in
Stonehenge, Ambresbury, and elsewhere, which vary a little from true
east and west, followed the variations of the compass. The Druids were
Phoenicians. The name of the magnet is _lapis Heracleus_, and Hercules
was the god of the Phoenicians. Hercules, in the legend, drew his bow
at the sun, and the sun-god gave him a golden cup, with which he sailed
over the ocean. What was this, but a compass-box? This cup or little
boat, in which the magnet was made to float on water, and so show the
north, was probably its first form, before it was suspended on a pin.
But science was an _arcanum_, and, as Britain was a Phoenician secret,
so they kept their compass a secret, and it was lost with the Tyrian
commerce. The golden fleece, again, of Jason, was the compass,--a bit
of loadstone, easily supposed to be the only one in the world, and
therefore naturally awakening the cupidity and ambition of the young
heroes of a maritime nation to join in an expedition to obtain
possession of this wise stone. Hence the fable that the ship Argo was
loquacious and oracular. There is also some curious coincidence in the
names. Apollodorus makes _Magnes_ the son of _AEolus_, who married
_Nais_. On hints like these, Stukeley builds again the grand colonnade
into historic harmony, and computing backward by the known variations of
the compass, bravely assigns the year 406 before Christ for the date of
the temple.
[23] Connected with Stonehenge are an avenue and a _cursus_. The avenue
is a narrow road of raised earth, extending 594 yards in a
straight line from the grand entrance, then dividing into two
branches, which lead, severally, to a row of barrows: and to the
cursus,--an artificially formed flat tract of ground. This is
half a mile northeast from Stonehenge, bounded by banks and
ditches, 3,036 yards long, by 110 broad.
For the difficulty of handling and carrying stones of this size, the
like is done in all cities, every day, with no other aid than
horse-power. I chanced to see a year ago men at work on the
substructure of a house in Bowdoin Square, in Boston, swinging a block
of granite of the size of the largest of the Stonehenge columns with an
ordinary derrick. The men were common masons, with paddies to help, nor
did they think they were doing anything remarkable. I suppose there
were as good men a thousand years ago. And we wonder how Stonehenge was
built and forgotten. After spending half an hour on the spot, we set
forth in our dog-cart over the downs for Wilton, C. not suppressing some
threats and evil omens on the proprietors, for keeping these broad
plains a wretched sheep-walk when so many thousands of Englishmen were
hungry and wanted labor. But I heard afterwards that it is not an
economy to cultivate this land, which only yields one crop on being
broken up, and is then spoiled.
We came to Wilton and to Wilton Hall,--the renowned seat of the Earls of
Pembroke, a house known to Shakspeare and Massinger, the frequent home
of Sir Philip Sidney, where he wrote the Arcadia; where he conversed
with Lord Brooke, a man of deep thought, and a poet, who caused to be
engraved on his tombstone, "Here lies Fulke Greville Lord Brooke, the
friend of Sir Philip Sidney." It is now the property of the Earl of
Pembroke, and the residence of his brother, Sidney Herbert, Esq., and is
esteemed a noble specimen of the English manor-hall. My friend had a
letter from Mr. Herbert to his housekeeper, and the house was shown. The
state drawing-room is a double cube, thirty feet high, by thirty wide,
by sixty feet long: the adjoining room is a single cube, of thirty feet
every way. Although these apartments and the long library were full of
good family portraits, Vandykes and other; and though there were some
good pictures, and a quadrangle cloister full of antique and modern
statuary,--to which C., catalogue in hand, did all too much
justice,--yet the eye was still drawn to the windows, to a magnificent
lawn, on which grew the finest cedars in England. I had not seen more
charming grounds. We went out, and walked over the estate. We crossed
a bridge built by Inigo Jones over a stream, of which the gardener did
not know the name, (_Qu._ Alph?) watched the deer; climbed to the lonely
sculptured summer-house, on a hill backed by a wood; came down into the
Italian garden, and into a French pavilion, garnished with French busts;
and so, again to the house, where we found a table laid for us with
bread, meats, peaches, grapes, and wine.
On leaving Wilton House, we took the coach for Salisbury. The Cathedral
which was finished six hundred years ago has even a spruce and modern
air, and its spire is the highest in England. I know not why, but I had
been more struck with one of no fame at Coventry, which rises three
hundred feet from the ground, with the lightness of a mullein-plant, and
not at all implicated with the church. Salisbury is now esteemed the
culmination of the Gothic art in England, as the buttresses are fully
unmasked, and honestly detailed from the sides of the pile. The
interior of the Cathedral is obstructed by the organ in the middle,
acting like a screen. I know not why in real architecture the hunger of
the eye for length of line is so rarely gratified. The rule of art is
that a colonnade is more beautiful the longer it is, and that _ad
infinitum_. And the nave of a church is seldom so long that it need be
divided by a screen.
We loitered in the church, outside the choir, whilst service was said.
Whilst we listened to the organ, my friend remarked, the music is good
and yet not quite religious, but somewhat as if a monk were panting to
some fine Queen of Heaven. C. was unwilling, and we did not ask to have
the choir shown us, but returned to our inn, after seeing another old
church of the place. We passed in the train Clarendon Park, but could
see little but the edge of a wood, though C. had wished to pay closer
attention to the birthplace of the Decrees of Clarendon. At Bishopstoke
we stopped, and found Mr. H., who received us in his carriage, and took
us to his house at Bishops Waltham.
On Sunday, we had much discourse on a very rainy day. My friends ask,
whether there were any Americans?--any with an American idea,--any
theory of the right future of that country? Thus challenged, I
bethought myself neither of caucuses nor congress, neither of presidents
nor of cabinet-ministers, nor of such as would make of America another
Europe. I thought only of the simplest and purest minds; I said,
'Certainly yes; but those who hold it are fanatics of a dream which I
should hardly care to relate to your English ears, to which it might be
only ridiculous,--and yet it is the only true.' So I opened the dogma
of no government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and
the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, it is true that
I have never seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for
this truth, and yet it is plain to me that no less valor than this can
command my respect. I can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar
musket-worship,--though great men be musket-worshippers; and 't is
certain, as God liveth, the gun that does not need another gun, the law
of love and justice alone, can effect a clean revolution. I fancied
that one or two of my anecdotes made some impression on C., and I
insisted that the manifest absurdity of the view to English feasibility
could make no difference to a gentleman; that as to our secure tenure of
our mutton-chop and spinage in London or in Boston, the soul might quote
Talleyrand, "_Monsieur, je n'en vois pas la necessite_."[24] As I had
thus taken in the conversation the saint's part, when dinner was
announced, C. refused to go out before me,--"he was altogether too
wicked." I planted my back against the wall, and our host wittily
rescued us from the dilemma, by saying, he was the wickedest, and would
walk out first, then C. followed, and I went last.
[24] "Mais, Monseigneur, il faut que j'existe."
On the way to Winchester, whither our host accompanied us in the
afternoon, my friends asked many questions respecting American
landscape, forests, houses,--my house, for example. It is not easy to
answer these queries well. There I thought, in America, lies nature
sleeping, overgrowing, almost conscious, too much by half for man in the
picture, and so giving a certain tristesse, like the rank vegetation of
swamps and forests seen at night, steeped in dews and rains, which it
loves; and on it man seems not able to make much impression. There, in
that great sloven continent, in high Alleghany pastures, in the
sea-wide, sky-skirted prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and hides the
great mother, long since driven away from the trim hedge-rows and
over-cultivated garden of England. And, in England, I am quite too
sensible of this. Every one is on his good behavior, and must be
dressed for dinner at six. So I put off my friends with very inadequate
details, as best I could.
Just before entering Winchester, we stopped at the Church of Saint
Cross, and, after looking through the quaint antiquity, we demanded a
piece of bread and a draught of beer, which the founder, Henry de Blois,
in 1136, commanded should be given to every one who should ask it at the
gate. We had both, from the old couple who take care of the church.
Some twenty people, every day, they said, make the same demand. This
hospitality of seven hundred years' standing did not hinder C. from
pronouncing a malediction on the priest who receives L2,000 a year, that
were meant for the poor, and spends a pittance on this small-beer and
crumbs.
In the Cathedral, I was gratified, at least by the ample dimensions.
The length of line exceeds that of any other English church; being 556
feet by 250 in breadth of transept. I think I prefer this church to all
I have seen, except Westminster and York. Here was Canute buried, and
here Alfred the Great was crowned and buried, and here the Saxon kings:
and, later, in his own church, William of Wykeham. It is very old: part
of the crypt into which we went down and saw the Saxon and Norman arches
of the old church on which the present stands, was built fourteen or
fifteen hundred years ago. Sharon Turner says: "Alfred was buried at
Winchester, in the Abbey he had founded there, but his remains were
removed by Henry I. to the new Abbey in the meadows at Hyde, on the
northern quarter of the city, and laid under the high altar. The
building was destroyed at the Reformation, and what is left of Alfred's
body now lies covered by modern buildings, or buried in the ruins of the
old."[25] William of Wykeham's shrine tomb was unlocked for us, and C.
took hold of the recumbent statue's marble hands, and patted them
affectionately, for he rightly values the brave man who built Windsor,
and this Cathedral, and the School here, and New College at Oxford. But
it was growing late in the afternoon. Slowly we left the old house, and
parting with our host, we took the train for London.
[25] History of the Anglo-Saxons, I. 599.