Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/72

 over their destiny, they carved huge boulders into symmetrical forms and erected monoliths and triliths. Some they dragged over to Salisbury Plain and there established their Temple to the Sun: vast concentric circles of stone, burning in the fierce heat of noonday, chill as death at midnight. Here at Stonehenge their vague terrors prompted them to offer the blood of their own sons and daughters to appease their instinctive and traditional concepts of a stern and outraged "justice." ("I think you are lying," says Angel to Tess, "on the very altar on which they offered their sacrifices." . . .)

The Wessex realm became a vaguely circumscribed district, bounded on the east and north by a line running from where Portsmouth now stands, over towards the sources of the Thames, and to the west, clear to Land's End. Here hoary legendary British kings ruled their rude people with passion and caprice, here bards chanted of blood and demons—while far to the southeast, along the shores of the Mediterranean, people were developing law, art, literature and philosophy. It is pleasant to dream, once remarked Hardy, that in some spot in the extensive tract named "Egdon" may be the hearth of that traditionary King of Wessex, Ina, afterwards named Lear. The storms that now howl about the ears of the belated nightly wayfarer on these barren moors, at any rate, are the identical tempests that puffed their cheeks and mercilessly goaded on the white-haired old monarch, a pathetic figure, mad, quite mad, a victim of man's eternal inhumanity to man.

Relentless legions of the Roman Caesars next left the imprint of their steel-shod heels over the country.