I watched the sun rise today as I do most days, but with a different perspective. It is the solstice—the longest day, the hinge of the year—and I found myself thinking about how others have marked this turning point through the ages. Only later in the day did my thoughts turn to Ralph Waldo Emerson and his journey with Thomas Carlyle to Stonehenge, where they too stood in silence at the meeting place of stone and sun.

In July of 1848, Emerson (America’s great Transcendentalist philosopher) made a pilgrimage to one of the oldest monuments in Britain: the great stone circle of Stonehenge. His companion for the journey was the formidable Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish writer and historian whose influence loomed large over Victorian letters. The two were dear friends despite their differences. Emerson was warm and idealistic. Carlyle imperious and irritable. Emerson later recounted the experience in a travel chapter simply titled “Stonehenge.” It is a poignant meditation on time, civilization, and the enduring silence of the stones.

The two thinkers set off from London on July 7th, taking the South-Western Railway to Salisbury and then a carriage to Amesbury. Emerson was charmed by the notion of visiting “the oldest religious monument in Britain” in the company of “her latest thinker” (Carlyle).[1] Their path took them past bare hills and forgotten towns—places like Old Sarum, once vibrant enough to send representatives to Parliament, now reduced to little more than a memory in the earth. After dinner at the George Inn, they walked to the Plain under a gray sky.

The scene that greeted them was stark and elemental: “not a house was visible,” Emerson wrote, “nothing but Stonehenge… and the barrows… and a few hay-ricks.”[2] The monument itself, he said, “looked like a group of brown dwarfs in the wide expanse.” But his initial lack of awe from a distance gave way to quiet reverence once he stood among the giants.

Stonehenge, even then, was a curiosity wrapped in legend. Emerson took an interest in the many conflicting theories about its origins. He was amused by the bold claims of antiquarians like William Stukeley, who traced the monument to Phoenician Druids and imagined a hidden science of magnetic alignments and ancient compasses. He also referenced Geoffrey of Monmouth’s medieval tale that Stonehenge was the “Dance of Giants,” brought magically from Ireland by Merlin to honor fallen British nobles. Emerson didn’t endorse the legends, but he appreciated the mythic weight they lent the site—remarking that even in the silence of tradition, such stories offered “an important clew,” referring to the corner of a sail to which the rigging is fastened. Folklore, then, becomes a point of contact, small but steadying, by which we might orient ourselves amid the vastness of the past.[3]

But if Emerson poked gentle fun at the speculation, he was far more interested in the mood and feeling the place evoked. He didn’t trouble himself with the theories, being “content to leave that problem with the rocks.”[4] He focused instead on their silence and presence—their simplicity and endurance, which mattered most. “It was pleasant to see,” he reflected, “that just this simplest of all simple structures—two upright stones and a lintel laid across—had long outstood all later churches, and all history.”[5] Their very starkness made them feel like nature itself.

Among the wild thyme, buttercups, nettles, and daisy-covered grass, the two philosophers wandered and measured and clambered over stones. Above them, larks soared and sang—“the larks which were hatched last year,” Carlyle said to him, “and the wind which was hatched many thousand years ago.”[6] Carlyle lit a cigar among the ancient monoliths. It’s an image that strikes me as both comic and quietly poignant: a modern sage somewhat irreverently puffing smoke into a sacred space where ancient people once gathered, their rites now lost to time.

At some point, they found a quiet nook among the stones to sit. In that wind-swept circle—open to the sky, uncovered, astronomically aligned—they were no longer writers or Americans or Englishmen. “To these conscious stones,” Emerson wrote, “we two pilgrims were alike known and near.”[7] Whatever their nationalities, their philosophies, or their temperaments, in the presence of Stonehenge they were simply human beings, briefly alive, passing through time.

What Emerson seemed to take from the experience was not an academic historical lesson, nor a spiritual revelation (and Emerson did look for revelation in things). Rather, he was moved by the way the stones outlast everything—religions, monarchs, wars, empires, books. They remained, as he said, “like what is most permanent on the face of the planet.” In the face of this permanence, human quarrels and clever theories fell away. “The old sphinx put our petty differences… out of sight.”

For Emerson, who believed in the divinity of the individual and the sacredness of nature, Stonehenge became a kind of eternal sermon—one preached not in words, but in silence, shadow, and sun. The stones were not dead relics; they were alive in their endurance, whispering a message he could almost hear: Stand still. Endure. Witness.

They left the site in the twilight, intending to return the next morning, and made their way back to their exceedingly modest inn. Though mildly amused by its meager fare, they carried with them the lingering spell of the stones.

The next morning, Emerson engaged a local antiquarian as a guide and they returned to Stonehenge. He was shown by this Mr. Brown how the sun at midsummer crests exactly above a particular upright when viewed from the “sacrifice stone.” It was a simple, elegant connection between earth and sky. Emerson didn’t dwell on it, but the quiet awe behind his account is unmistakable. The sun still rises over that same stone. It did then; it does now.

In the end, Emerson left the stones as he had found them—silent, strong, eternal. He didn’t try to solve their riddle. He simply stood among them and listened. And that, perhaps, was enough.

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[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, in The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1950), 668.

[2] Emerson, 670.

[3] Emerson, 673.

[4] Emerson, 673.

[5] Emerson, 670.

[6] Emerson, 671.

[7] Emerson, 672.