set off to Stonehenge. It was a
fine still night, without a cloud in the pale, dusky blue sky, thinly
sprinkled with stars, and the crescent moon coming up above the horizon.
After the cock ceased crowing a tawny owl began to hoot, and the long
tremulous mellow sound followed me for some distance from the village,
and then there was perfect silence, broken occasionally by the tinkling
bells of a little company of cyclists speeding past towards "The
Stones." I was in no hurry: I only wished I had started sooner to enjoy
Salisbury Plain at its best time, when all the things which offend the
lover of nature are invisible and nonexistent. Later, when the first
light began to appear in the east before two o'clock, it was no false
dawn, but insensibly grew brighter and spread further, until touches
of colour, very delicate, palest amber, then tender yellow and rose
and purple, began to show. I felt then as we invariably feel on such
occasions, when some special motive has called us forth in time to
witness this heavenly change, as of a new creation--

The miracle of diuturnity
Whose instancy unbeds the lark,

that all the days of my life on which I had not witnessed it were wasted
days!

O that unbedding of the lark! The world that was so still before now all
at once had a sound; not a single song and not in one place, but a sound
composed of a thousand individual sounds, rising out of the dark earth
at a distance on my right hand and up into the dusky sky, spreading far
and wide even as the light was spreading on the opposite side of the
heavens--a sound as of multitudinous twanging, girding, and clashing
instruments, mingled with shrill piercing voices that were not like
the voices of earthly beings. They were not human nor angelic, but
passionless, and it was as if the whole visible world, the dim grassy
plain and the vast pale sky sprinkled with paling stars, moonlit and
dawnlit, had found a voice to express the mystery and glory of the
morning.

It was but eight minutes past two o'clock when this "unbedding of the
lark" began, and the heavenly music lasted about fourteen minutes, then
died down to silence, to recommence about half an hour later. At first I
wondered why the sound was at a distance from the road on my right hand
and not on my left hand as well. Then I remembered what I had seen on
that side, how the "boys" at play on Sundays and in fact every day hunt
the birds and pull their nests