which no Englishman, of whatever condition, can easily entertain.”

It is seldom that Emerson undertakes any detailed description of particular natural scenery. Indeed, the general scope of his prose works precludes such. But scattered everywhere are detached sentences which evince that he looked upon nature with open eyes; and his account of Stonehenge and their visit shows that he had within him capacities for picturesque description which would have enabled him to write a brilliant book of travel-say another “Eöthen.”

THE VISIT TO STONEHENGE.

"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 rise 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 British race to the old egg out of which all their ecclesiastical structures and history had proceeded.

66 Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with the diameter of hundred feet, and inclosing a second and a third colonnade within. We walked round the stones, and clambered over them, to wont ourselves with their strange associations and groupings. We 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-has long outstood all later churches, and all history, and is like what is most permanent on the face of the planet. These, and the barrows-mere mounds-of which there are one 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 the Hellespont the vaunt of Homer and the fame of Achilles. Within the inclosure grow buttercups and nettles, and all around wild thyme, meadow-sweet, golden-rod, thistles, and the sheltering grass. Over us larks were soaring and singing: as Carlyle 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 entrance, here and at Abury, being placed exactly northeast, as all the gates of the old cavern temples are. How came the stones here? for these Sarcens, or Druidical sandstones, are not found in this neighborhood. The 'Sacrificial Stone,' as it is called, is the only one of all these blocks that can resist the action of fire; and, as I read in books, must have been brought a hundred and fifty miles. 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 on one 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 Layard or Fellowes will arrive, stone by stone, at the whole history, by that exhaustive British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its choice of subjects, which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to the rabbits, while 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 which it will eliminate."

Stonehenge furnished Emerson with topics for characteristic reflection, and Carlyle with a theme for some of his weird utterances. Emerson continues :

"We walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh look at the uncaring stones. The old Sphinx put our petty differences of nationality out of sight. To these conscious stones we two pilgrims were alike near and dear. We could equally well revere their old British meaning. Carlyle was subdued and gentle. 'In this great House of Destiny,' he said, '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 religions. The

old times of England impress him much. He reads but little, he says, in these last years, but the 'Acta Sanctorum,' the fifty-two volumes of which are in the London Library. He can see, as he reads, the old Saint of Iona, sitting there and writing—a man to men. "The "Acta Sanctorum" shows 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 Puritanism is 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 great men had gone."

We suppose that Carlyle would have named William of Wykeham as about the last of those great men who appeared in England about the time of Chaucer. During this whole trip Carlyle was in his most genial mood. There is hardly a trace of his almost chronic cynicism. Emerson gives a few characteristic incidents which occurred. At Salisbury Cathedral they loitered outside the choir while the service was going on; they listened to the organ, and Carlyle remarked: "The music is good; but somewhat as if a monk were panting to some fine Queen of Heaven." Near Winchester they stopped at the quaint old Church of St. Cross, and demanded a piece of bread and a draught of beer, which Henry de Blois, who founded the church in 1136, ordered should be given to every one who should ask for it at the gate. This was doled out to them by the old couple who take care of the church. Some

twenty people a day, they said, made the same demand. "This hospitality of seven hundred years' standing did not hinder Carlyle from pronouncing a malediction on the priest who receives two thousand pounds a year that were meant for the poor, and spends a pittance on this small beer and crumbs." They went to Winchester Cathedral, the largest in the country, the length of the nave being 556 feet, and the breadth of the transept 250 feet, and which Emerson preferred to any church which he had seen in England except Westminster and York. Here Canute was buried ; here Alfred the Great was crowned and buried; here the Saxon kings were buried; and here, also, in his own church, was buried the great Bishop William of Wykeham. "William of Wykeham's shrine-tomb was unlocked for us," says Emerson, and Carlyle took hold of the marble hands of the recumbent statue and patted them affectionately; for he values the brave man who built Windsor, this cathedral, and the school here, and New College at Oxford."

Once again, after a lapse of twenty years, Emerson made a third visit to England, where he must have had some solemn interviews with Carlyle, now verging upon fourscore, bent and infirm, his life's work altogether done, and looking wearily for the impending end of all earthly things. But of these interviews we have no record.