"Stonehenge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... must have been either Inigo Jones's "The most notable Antiquity of Great Britain vulgarly called Stonehenge," printed in 1655, or "Chorea Gigantum, or the most famous Antiquity of Great Britain, vulgarly called Stones Heng, standing on Salisbury Plain, restor'd to the Danes," by Walter Charleton, M.D., and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... for seasons, for days and for years," that the turning points in the sun's yearly course, the solstices, would naturally become periods of worship. That the Summer solstice was an important religious period is rendered probable from the following curious observation concerning Stonehenge, which appeared in the Notes and Queries portion of the Scotsman newspaper for July 31, 1875. The Scotsman's correspondent states that "a party of Americans went on midsummer morning this year to see the sun rise upon Stonehenge. They found crowds ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... found, With Stonehenge monoliths around, But who had built and who had planned We tried in vain to understand, As future learned men may search The reasons for our village church. This was our limit, for next day We turned upon, our homeward way, Passing first Culloden's plain Where the tombstones of the slain ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... surrounded the invalid. Conversation the most polished and brilliant revived her spirits. Travelling was recommended to her; and she rambled by easy journeys from cathedral to cathedral, and from watering-place to watering-place. She crossed the New Forest, and visited Stonehenge and Wilton, the cliffs of Lyme, and the beautiful valley of Sidmouth. Thence she journeyed by Powderham Castle, and by the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, to Bath, and from Bath, when the winter was approaching, returned well and cheerful to London. There she visited her ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the impassable mystery of Romney Marsh. In such a situation, before the railways revolutionised travel in England, how could Ashford have had any importance? Even the old road westward from Dover into Britain, the Pilgrims' Way to Stonehenge or Winchester passed it by, leaving it in the Weald to follow the escarpment of the Downs north or west. No Roman road served it, and indeed it was but a small and isolated place till the Middle Age began to revive and recreate Europe. Even then Ashford was ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... the Round Table at Carduel for 150 knights, which came into the possession of King Arthur on his marriage with Queen Guinever; and brought from Ireland the stones of Stonehenge ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... will use this faculty of judgment more or less, whether you theoretically admit the principle or not. Take that floral gable;* you don't suppose the man who built Stonehenge could have built that, or that the man who built that, would have built Stonehenge? Do you think an old Roman would have liked such a piece of filigree work? or that Michael Angelo would have spent his time in twisting these stems of roses in and out? Or, of modern ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... hidden in the woods, others rose gloomily out of the sweet simplicity of a hayfield, but each contrived to give the effect of a miniature Stonehenge, and had there been only one monument instead of three, it would have been worth the trouble we took to see it. Besides, our expedition was rewarded in another way. When we returned to the boats after breakfasting at a cafe in the woods, ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... space submit to him: his old schoolfellows were vainly astonished that he gave no chapters to them and his years at Norwich Grammar School. Thus England seems a great and a strange land on Borrow's page, though he does not touch the sea or the mountains, or any celebrated places except Stonehenge. His England is strange, I think, because it is presented according to a purely spiritual geography in which the childish drawling of "Witney on the Windrush manufactures blankets," etc., is utterly forgot. Few men have the courage or the power to be honestly impressionistic ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... Druid-like device, With leaden pools between or gullies bare, The blocks lie strewn, a bleak Stonehenge of ice; No life, no sound, to break the grim despair, Save sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff Down crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff, Or ashen the close-wedged fields of ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... remains or tombs are near. They have had the name of 'barrow' given to them, and in them are discovered, besides bones, old weapons, jewels, pottery, and other objects. At no great distance is the Druids' temple of Stonehenge, and the still more remarkable one of Abury, of which but fragments are left, though it must have been far grander than Stonehenge. The Saxon King, Egbert, lived chiefly at Old Sarum, as did several other kings, and in 960 Edgar held a national council in the city, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... III., and Mr. Gardiner's Anecdotes of T. Moore. 6. Historical Notes on the Retaining of Counsel. 7. Roman Antiquities found at Kingsholm, near Gloucester. 8. Remains of Norman Cross at Birstall, co. York (with an Engraving). 9. The Bourne Stream near Croydon. 10. Dr. Guest on the Etymology of Stonehenge. Correspondence of Sylvanus Urban: The Itinerary of Richard of Cirencester.—The Roches and Viscounty of Fermoy.—Recent repairs of Lambeth Church.—Early state of St. James's Park.—Postmen, temp. Charles ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... disposed of an unidentifiable manuscript for the sumptuous equivalent of 20 pounds. On May 22nd, after little more than a year's residence in London, he abandons the city. From London he proceeds to Amesbury, in Wiltshire, which he reaches on May 23rd; visits Stonehenge, the Roman Camp of Old Sarum and Salisbury; on May 26th he leaves Salisbury, and (after an encounter with the long-lost son of the old applewoman, returned from Botany Bay), strikes north-west. On the 30th he has been walking four days in a northerly direction, when he arrives at the inn where ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... remarkably well read in the history of his own country, and it had been understood for the last twenty years by the Antiquarian, Archaeological, and other societies that he was the projector of a new theory about Stonehenge, and that his book on the subject was almost ready. Such were the two surviving members of the present senior branch of the family. But Sir Gregory had two brothers,—the younger of the two being Parson John Marrable, the present rector of St. Peter's Lowtown and the occupier of the house ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... of deer—a specimen of what the whole once was, and a specimen of consummate beauty and interest. The part called Bilhaghe is a forest of oaks, and is clothed with the most impressive aspect of age that can be presented to the eye in these kingdoms. Stonehenge does not give you a feeling of greater eld, because it is not composed of a material so easily acted on by the elements. But the hand of Time has been on these woods, and has stamped them with a most imposing character. The tempests, lightnings, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... have visited, or intend visiting, comparing notes about the counties, towns, churches, castles, scenery—all that draws them and satisfies their nature, and the chances are that they will not even mention Wiltshire. They all know it "in a way"; they have seen Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge, which everybody must go to look at once in his life; and they have also viewed the country from the windows of a railroad carriage as they passed through on their flight to Bath and to Wales with its mountains, and to the west country, ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... in an open plain. Vast heaps of stone still remaining, denote the scenes of these national councils. (See Mallet's Introduct. to Hist. of Denmark.) The English Stonehenge has been supposed a relic of this kind. In these assemblies are seen the origin of those which, under the Merovingian race of French kings, were called the Fields of March; under the Carlovingian, the Fields of May; then, the Plenary ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... hollows, confused among the recessed darknesses of the marble crags, surrounded by mere laths of living stem, each with its coronal of glorious green leaves. Why can't the tree go on, and on,—hollowing itself into a Fairy—no—a Dryad, Ring,—till it becomes a perfect Stonehenge of a tree? Truly, "I am not sent to tell thee, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... about eating grass, he is threatening them with consequences. When the Tariff Reformer says that if Free Trade exists for another year St. Paul's Cathedral will be a ruin and Ludgate Hill as deserted as Stonehenge, he is also threatening. And what is the good of being a Tariff Reformer if you can't say that? What is the use of being a politician or a Parliamentary candidate at all if one cannot tell the people that if the other man gets in, England will be ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... whether I dared to come, I took a short cut at a venture through an unfrequented road near Earl's Court, and so happened on a white wall and a familiar green door. 'Odd!' said I to myself, 'but I thought this place was on Campden Hill. It's the place I never could find somehow—like counting Stonehenge—the place of that queer day dream of mine.' And I went by it intent upon my purpose. It had no appeal to ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... machines that were employed to raise it are represented upon it in basso-relievo. We have some vestiges in England of the hippodromus, in which the ancient inhabitants of this country performed their races. The most remarkable is that near Stonehenge, which is a long tract of ground, about three hundred and fifty feet, or two hundred Druid cubits wide, and more than a mile and three quarters, or six thousand Druid cubits in length, enclosed quite round with a bank of earth, extending directly east and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... a brave from town. Passing by your broad acres this fine morning we saw a pightle, which we deemed would suit. Lend us that pightle, and receive our thanks; 'twould be a favour, though not much to grant: we neither ask for Stonehenge ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... England. First we went to Salisbury. I was deeply interested in the Cathedral there, because it is possibly the only great Gothic structure of the kind in Europe which was completed in a single style during a single reign. Stonehenge was to me even more remarkable, because it is more mysterious. Its stupendous barbarism or archaic character, involving a whole lost cycle of ideas, contrasts so strangely with the advanced architectural ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... unlikely spot is made use of by daws as a place to breed in, and that is Stonehenge. These birds deposit their nests in the interstices between the upright and the impost stones of that amazing work of antiquity: which circumstance alone speaks the prodigious height of the upright stones, that they should be tall enough to secure those nests from ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... theories, a somewhat excessive part; Arthur and his Twelve (?) Knights of the Round Table signifying solely the year with its twelve months; Percival and the Miller signifying solely steel and the grindstone; Stonehenge and the Gododin put to purely calendarial purposes; the Nibelungen, the Mahabharata, and the Iliad, finally following the fate of the Gododin; all this appears to me, I will confess, a little prematurely grasped, a little unsubstantial. But that any one who ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... finds conclusive evidence that the breed was very fairly represented in many parts of England, notably in Suffolk, Hampshire, and Dorsetshire, and also in Wales. Youatt writes of it in 1845, Richardson in 1847, and "Stonehenge" in 1859. Their descriptions vary a little, though the leading characteristics are much the same, but each writer specially notes the exceptional sagacity ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... trying to solve the arithmetical problem, which cannot be readily accomplished, as the stones lie intermingled in a very strange and irregular manner, and are overgrown with brushwood. The belief that these stones cannot be counted is one constantly found connected with similar remains, e.g. Stonehenge, Avebury, etc. We heard a local story of a baker, who once tried to effect the operation by placing a loaf on the top of each stone as a kind of check or tally; but a dog running away with one of his ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... buildings of any kind for the performance of their sacred rites. A circle of stones (each stone generally of vast size), enclosing an area of from twenty feet to thirty yards in diameter, constituted their sacred place. The most celebrated of these now remaining is Stonehenge, on ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... timidly forward, and in another moment I saw that my surmise was correct. I had come upon a sort of Stonehenge of rude and barbaric figures, seated as Chowbok had sat when I questioned him in the wool-shed, and with the same superhumanly malevolent expression upon their faces. They had been all seated, but two had fallen. They were barbarous—neither Egyptian, ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... raised in a day; nor the Mexican House of the Sun; nor the Alhambra; nor the Escurial; nor Titus's Amphitheater; nor the Illinois Mounds; nor Diana's great columns at Ephesus; nor Pompey's proud Pillar; nor the Parthenon; nor the Altar of Belus; nor Stonehenge; nor Solomon's Temple; nor Tadmor's towers; nor Susa's bastions; nor Persepolis' pediments. Round and round, the Moorish turret at Seville was not wound heavenward in the revolution of a day; and from its first founding, five hundred years did circle, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... visits Salisbury will forget Stonehenge, the most remarkable relic of prehistoric man to be found in Britain. Nearly everyone is familiar with pictures of this solitary circle of stones standing on an eminence of Salisbury Plain, but one who has not stood ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... 3rd Brigade were moved into huts at Lark Hill. They were certainly an improvement upon the tents, but they (p. 032) were draughty and leaky. From my window I could see, on the few occasions when the weather permitted it, the weird and ancient circles of Stonehenge. ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... astrologer went off in the direction of Stonehenge, whose stones formed his astrolabe, and the hare, much excited with the communication she had received (confirmed as it was too by the facts of the case), resolved to at once warn the monarch of his danger. Calling a beetle, she charged him with a message to the king: That he should listen to ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... old family, like your own," said Matilda. "Our ancestors probably knew each other in the days of Stonehenge. I, of course, recognised the coat-of-arms ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... roof. I sat down to rest on one of the stones, and looked upwards a while at the foliage. Then turning my gaze again towards the earth, I saw a vast circle of stones, moss-grown like that on which I sat, and ranged in a circle such as that of Stonehenge. It occupied an open space in the midst of the forest; and the grasses and climbing plants of the place had fastened on the crevices of the stones. One stone, larger and taller than the rest, stood at the ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford |
