inspired
with calm sweet sunny views of Nature, yet in whose writings literal
description is so rarely introduced, that it is a marvel how much the
single buttercup lights up the landscape for a quarter of a mile, when a
thousand would produce no effect whatever. This may have possibly been
art in Irving--art of the most subtle kind--but in Borrow it was
instinct, and hardly intentional. In this respect he was superior even
to Whitman.

And here I would say, apropos of Carlyle, Tennyson, Irving, Borrow,
Whitman, and some others whom I have met, that with such men in only one
or two interviews, one covers more ground and establishes more intimacy
than with the great majority of folk whom we meet and converse with
hundreds of times. Which fact has been set forth by Wieland in his work
on Democritus or the Abderites so ingeniously, as people expressed it a
century ago, or so cleverly, as we now say, or so sympathetically, as an
Italian would say, that my pen fails to utter the thoughts which arise in
me compared to what he has written.

When the summer came, or on the 1st of August, we started on a grand tour
about 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 skill displayed in the cutting and
fitting of the vast blocks, that the whole seems to be a mighty paradox.
This was the work of many thousands of men--of very well directed labour
under the supervision of architects who could draw and measure skilfully
with a grand sense of _proportion_ or symmetry, who had, however, not
attained to ornament--a thing without parallel in humanity. This is
absolutely bewildering, as is the utter want of all indication as to its
real purpose. The old British tradition that the stones were brought by
magic from Africa, coupled with what Sir John Lubbock and others declare
as to similar remains on the North African coast, suggest something, but
what that was remains to be discovered. Men have, however, developed
great works of the massive and simple order in poetry, as well as in
architecture. The Nibelungen Lied is a Stonehenge. There are