ther world,--serves
greatly to heighten their effect. History at the time of their erection
had no existence in these islands: the age, though it sought, through
the medium of strange, unknown rites, to communicate with Heaven, was
not knowing enough to communicate, through the medium of alphabet or
symbol, with posterity. The appearance of the obelisks, too, harmonizes
well with their great antiquity and the obscurity of their origin. For
about a man's height from the ground they are covered thick by the
shorter lichens,--chiefly the gray-stone parmelia,--here and there
embroidered by golden-hued patches of the yellow parmelia of the wall;
but their heads and shoulders, raised beyond the reach alike of the
herd-boy and of his herd, are covered by an extraordinary profusion of a
flowing beard-like lichen of unusual length,--the lichen _calicarus_
(or, according to modern botanists, _Ramalina scopulorum_), in which
they look like an assemblage of ancient Druids, mysteriously stern and
invincibly silent and shaggy as the bard of Gray, when

"Loose his beard and hoary hair
Streamed like a meteor on the troubled air."

The day was perhaps too sunny and clear for seeing the Standing Stones
to the best possible advantage. They could not be better placed than on
their flat promontories, surrounded by the broad plane of an extensive
lake, in a waste, lonely, treeless country, that presents no bold,
competing features to divert attention from them as the great central
objects of the landscape; but the gray of the morning, or an atmosphere
of fog and vapor, would have associated better with the mystic obscurity
of their history, their shaggy forms, and their livid tints, than the
glare of a cloudless sun, that brought out in hard, clear relief their
rude outlines, and gave to each its sharp dark patch of shadow.
Gray-colored objects, when tall and imposing, but of irregular form, are
seen always to most advantage in an uncertain light,--in fog or
frost-rime, or under a scowling sky, or, as Parnell well expresses it,
"amid the living gleams of night." They appeal, if I may so express
myself, to the sentiment of the ghostly and the spectral, and demand at
least a partial envelopment of the obscure. Burns, with the true tact of
the genuine poet, develops the sentiment almost instinctively in an
exquisite stanza in one of his less-known songs, "The Posey,"--

"The hawthorn I will pu', _wi' its locks o' siller gray_,
Where, _li