The Argosy — page 239: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

222 Under Northern Skies. All about, visible through the trees, were the upright runic stones. The melancholy pines cast long shadows. ‘The sunbeams penetrating this mysterious grove almost seemed to lose their brightness and warmth. A strange atmosphere, solemn and weird, penetrated the place through and through, cast its spell upon mind and spirit. One seemed chain-bound by its influence, as if the spirits of those who had walked and worshipped in these groves yet hovered about them. The very rustling of the pine trees above our heads seemed charged with voices of an unknown tongue. ‘The very shadows, deeply marked between the intervening sun spaces, might have been shades of the departed, that would presently lift and flit to and fro, and fill the groves with the mystery of the supernatural. It seemed impossible to leave the spot. Gloomy and mysterious and depressing, it yet had a strange power to charm, which seemed to steal over the senses like the subtle fumes of a deadly nightshade. It was not a healthy influence, but it was difficult to resist. Here, in these groves, in those unknown ages, overshadowed by trees such as these, the heathen rites of a mysterious religion were celebrated to the invisible and the imaginary. Rude sacrifices, immolations at the altar of superstition, were offered up in a vain propitiation. We had never before found a spot where all this was so wonderfully realised. It 1s doubtful whether such another exists. The remains of Stonehenge, those great ruins on Salisbury Plain, cleaving the sky with sharp outlines, in that desolate moor, where nothing else seems to stand between them and the eternity of space, appeared powerless to impress the mind in comparison with the sroves and stones and mounds and circles of Louiselund. The one is a ruin and a remains, requiring a key to its interpretation: the other might have been in full possession of rites and ceremonials only an hour ago. It might still be warm with the blood of sacrifice, still echoing with the cry of a victim. The whole was surrounded by a thick, high hedge, which still more separated the grove from the outer world. Beyond that hedge, fields of waving corn stretched far away on the one side, bathed in sunshine. ‘They seemed out of place, unneeded. We were under the spell of Louiselund. Life ought to be visionary and spiritual. The grosser wants of the body had no place here. Existence was supported without food: time was not marked by moments and hours. We sat and absorbed the influence in spite of ourselves. Sat upon a sacred mound and dreamed dreams, and imagined the air full of spiritual influences about to claim us for their own. Our past life was over, remembrance was dying out, the world as we had known it was fading. A torpor was creeping over our senses; our nerves vibrated like a harp of a thousand strings struck by unseen hands. We were powerless to move. The shadows lengthened and the sun went downwards, and stillwe moved not. How long we should have COM (>) eDOOKSHGO