Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present
John Stuart Mill · en
"Neither does this mystery end here; for around the monuments which were
reared by the earliest inhabitants of Great Britain there still reigns a
deep darkness; we know not what hands piled together the rude remains of
Stonehenge; we have but few records of the manners, the customs, or the
religion of the early Britons: here and there a colossal barrow heaves
up above the dead; we look within, and find a few bones, a few rude
weapons, either used in war or the chase, and these are all; and we
linger in wonderment around such remains! Who those ancient voyagers
were that first called England the 'Country of Sea Cliffs,' we know not;
and while we sit and brood over the rude fragments of the Welsh Triads,
we become so entangled in doubt and mystery as to look upon the son of
Aedd the Great, and the Island of Honey to which he sailed, and wherein
he found no man alive, as the pleasing dream of some old and forgotten
poet; and we set out again with no more success to discover who were the
earliest inhabitants of England, leaving the ancient Cymri and the
country of Summer behind, and the tall, silent cliffs to stand, as they
had done for ages, looking over a wide and mastless sea.
"We then look among the ancient names of the headlands, and harbours,
and mountains, and hills, and valleys, and endeavour to trace a
resemblance to the language spoken by some neighbouring nation; and we
only glean up a few scattered words, which leave us still in doubt, like
a confusion of echoes, one breaking in upon the other; a minglement of
Celtic, Pictish, Gaulish, and Saxon sounds; where, if for a moment but
one is audible and distinct, it is drowned by other successive clamours
which come panting up with a still louder claim; and in very despair we
are compelled to step back again into the old primeval silence. There we
find geology looking daringly into the formation of the early world, and
boldly proclaiming that there was a period of time when our island
heaved up bare and desolate amid the silence of the surrounding
ocean--when on its ancient promontories and grey granite peaks not a
green branch waved nor a blade of grass grew; and no living thing,
saving the tiny corals, as they piled dome upon dome above the naked
foundations of this early world, stirred in the 'deep profound' which
reigned over those sleeping seas. Onward they go, boldly discoursing of
undated centuries that have passed away, during which they tell us the
ocean swarmed with huge monstrous forms; and that all those countless
ages have left to record their flight are but the remains of a few
extinct reptiles and fishes, whose living likenesses never again
appeared in the world. To another measureless period are we fearlessly
carried--so long as to be only numbered in the account of time which
eternity keeps--and other forms, we are told, moved over the floors of
dried-up oceans--vast animals which no human eye ever looked upon alive;