The Standing Stones—second in Britain, of their kind, only to those of Stonehenge—occur in two groups; the smaller group (composed, however, of the taller stones) on the southern promontory, the larger on the northern one. Rude and shapeless, and bearing no other impress of the designing faculty than that they are stuck endwise in the earth, and form, as a whole, regular figures on the sward, there is yet a sublime solemnity about them, unsurpassed in effect by any ruin I have yet seen, however grand in its design or imposing in its proportions. Their very rudeness, associated with their ponderous bulk and weight, adds to their impressiveness. When there is art and taste enough in a country to hew an ornate column, no one marvels that there should be also mechanical skill enough in it to set it up on end; but the men who tore from the quarry these vast slabs, some of them eighteen feet in height over the soil, and raised them where they now stand, must have been ignorant savages unacquainted with machinery, and unfurnished, apparently, with a single tool. The consideration, too, that these remains—eldest of the works of man in this country—should have so long survived all definite tradition of the purposes which they were raised to serve, so that we now merely know regarding them that they were religious in their uses—products of that ineradicable instinct of man’s nature which leads him in so many various ways to attempt conciliating the Powers of another world—serves greatly to heighten their effect. The appearance of the obelisks, too, harmonizes well with their great antiquity and the obscurity of their origin. For about a man’s height from the ground they are covered thick by the shorter lichens—chiefly the gray-stone _parmelia_—here and there embroidered by the golden-hued patches of the yellow _parmelia_ of the wall; but their heads and shoulders, raised beyond the reach alike of the herd-boy and of his herd, are covered by an extraordinary profusion of a flowing beard-like lichen of unusual length—the lichen _calicarus_ (or, according to modern botanists, _Ramalina scopulorum_), in which they look like an assemblage of ancient Druids, mysteriously stern and invincibly silent and shaggy as the Bard of Gray, when “Loose his beard and hoary hair Streamed like a meteor on the troubled air.”