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.