defences against the foes who later invaded them, we find few traces;
nothing at all to compare with their massive mausoleums. The other
world, for them, was a far weightier concern than this, and to the
purposes of that world, as they conceived it, all their energies were
directed. We can hardly doubt that, like other races who pay extreme
reverence to the dead, their inner vision beheld these departed ones
still around them and among them, forming with them a single race, a
single family, a single life. This world was for them only the threshold
of the other, the place of preparation. To that other their thoughts all
turned, for that other they raised these titanic buildings. The solemn
masses and simple grandeur of the cromlechs fitly symbolize the mood of
reverence in which they drew near to the sublime world of the hidden;
the awe with which their handiwork affirmed how greatly that world
outweighs this. At these houses of the dead they were joined in spirit
and communion with those who had passed away; once more united with
their fathers and their fathers' fathers, from the dim beginning of
their race. The air, for them, was full of spirits. Only the dead
truly lived.

The circles of standing stones are also devoted to ideal ends. Though
the men who set them up could have built not less wonderful forts or
dwellings of stone, we find none of these; nor has any worldly purpose
ever been assigned to the stone circles. Yet there seems to be a very
simple interpretation of their symbology; the circle, through all
antiquity, stood for the circling year, which ever returns to its point
of departure, spring repeating spring, summer answering to summer,
winter with its icy winds only the return of former winters: the
circling year and its landmarks, whether four seasons, or twelve months,
or twenty-seven lunar mansions, through one of which the wandering moon
passes in a day. We should thus have circles of twelve or twenty-seven