"It is indeed immensely picturesque. I can fancy sitting all a summer's day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world's duration and the feeble span of individual experience. There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring; and if you are disposed to feel that life is rather a superficial matter, and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the enormous background of time."
"He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart."
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Source: Henry James (1984). “Literary Criticism: French writers. Other European writers. The prefaces to the New York edition”, p.681, Library of America
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