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.

But no visions have been recorded. It is true that certain stories of
alleged visions have been circulated during the last few years. One,
very pretty and touching, is of a child from the London slums who saw
things invisible to others. This was one of the children of the very
poor, who are taken in summer and planted all about England in cottages
to have a week or a fortnight of country air and sunshine. Taken to
Stonehenge, she had a vision of a g