ke an aged man, it stands at break o' day_."

Scott, too, in describing these very stones, chooses the early morning
as the time in which to exhibit them, when they "stood in the gray light
of the dawning, like the phantom forms of antediluvian giants, who,
shrouded in the habiliments of the dead, come to revisit, by the pale
light, the earth which they had plagued with their oppression, and
polluted by their sins, till they brought down upon it the vengeance of
long-suffering heaven." On another occasion, he introduces them as
"glimmering, a grayish white, in the rising sun, and projecting far to
the westward their long gigantic shadows." And Malcolm, in the exercise
of a similar faculty with that of Burns and of Scott, surrounds them, in
his description, with a somewhat similar atmosphere of partial dimness
and obscurity:--

"The hoary rocks, of giant size,
That o'er the land in circles rise,
Of which tradition may not tell,
Fit circles for the wizard's spell,
Seen far _amidst the scowling storm_,
Seem each a tall and phantom form,
_As hurrying vapors o'er them flee,_
Frowning in grim security,
While, like a dread voice from the past,
Around them moans the autumnal blast."

There exist curious analogies between the earlier stages of society and
the more immature periods of life,--between the savage and the child;
and the huge circle of Stennis seems suggestive of one of these. It is
considerably more than four hundred feet in diameter, and the stones
which compose it, varying from three to fourteen feet in height, must
have been originally from thirty-five to forty in number, though only
sixteen now remain erect. A mound and fosse, still distinctly
traceable, run round the whole; and there are several mysterious-looking
tumuli outside, bulky enough to remind one of the lesser morains of the
geologist. But the circle, notwithstanding its imposing magnitude, is
but a huge child's house, after all,--one of those circles of stones
which children lay down on their village green, and then, in the
exercise of that imaginative faculty which distinguishes between the
young of the human animal and those of every other creature, convert, by
a sort of conventionalism, into a church or dwelling-house, within which
they seat themselves, and enact their imitations of their seniors,
whether domestic or ecclesiastical. The circle of Stennis was a circle,
say the antiquaries, devoted to the sun. The group of stones on t