Lytton at Stonehenge

Meanwhile, acting on what he called an 'inspiration', Lytton shouldered a knapsack and marched off alone to Salisbury. The next few weeks he spent trudging obstinately over the Wiltshire and Berkshire downs. ... 'It was really a heavenly experience,' he afterwards enthused in a letter to Henry Lamb (9 November 1912). 'I recovered my health and spirits--but not only that: I found that there are joys in solitude that I'd hitherto hardly dreamt of.'
      ... He was by this time sporting a conspicuous, bright yellow coat worn over a beautiful new suit of 'mouse-coloured corduroys' and an orange waistcoat; and his outlandish, heavily-haversacked figure caused some stir among the local populace as he stepped out gaily along the roads and fields, especially because he was also wearing golden earrings. These, he told [his brother] James, were a great solace to him, although evidently outraging the good citizens of Wiltshire. ... One of the highlights of his journey--certainly the most exotic spectacle that it provided--was Lytton's raid on Stonehenge. From his hotel at Amesbury he stole out at dusk, and with the moon bright and rising behind him, approached the monument--a dark cluster of awkward shapes standing isolated in the empty plain, as if they had somehow been forgotten and left behind there. At a distance it all looked disappointingly small and squat; but then, drawing nearer, he realized that in this peculiar compactness lay its unique power and beauty. He thought of the fallen gods in Hyperion--the great old stones seemed to have come huddling together in a melancholy little group, like the last fragment of an army. They had that ominous look of blackness and contraction which extreme old age alone can give. The barbed wire fence was easy to negotiate, and on entering the ring, Lytton discovered that the effect from within, under the gathering twilight, was altogether different, inexplicably awe-inspiring. Each stone was in reality a gigantic bulk dwarfing him into insignificance, while, in the darkness which stretched away beyond the pillared circle, the twentieth century appeared all at once immeasurably remote.