miss it
the next? I think if we, knowing nothing of either gunpowder, astronomy,
or Christianity, saw an Armstrong bolt fall within five miles of London,
we should be inclined to be very respectful to it indeed. So the
aerolites, or glacial boulders, or polished stone weapons of an extinct
race, which looked like aerolites, were the children of Ouranos the
heaven, and had souls in them. One, by one of those strange
transformations in which the logic of unreason indulges, the image of
Diana of the Ephesians, which fell down from Jupiter; another was the
Ancile, the holy shield which fell from the same place in the days of
Numa Pompilius, and was the guardian genius of Rome; and several more
became notable for ages.

Why not? The uneducated man of genius, unacquainted alike with
metaphysics and with biology, sees, like a child, a personality in every
strange and sharply-defined object. A cloud like an angel may be an
angel; a bit of crooked root like a man may be a man turned into
wood--perhaps to be turned back again at its own will. An erratic block
has arrived where it is by strange unknown means. Is not that an
evidence of its personality? Either it has flown hither itself, or some
one has thrown it. In the former case, it has life, and is
proportionally formidable; in the latter, he who had thrown it is
formidable.

I know two erratic blocks of porphyry--I believe there are three--in
Cornwall, lying one on serpentine, one, I think, on slate, which--so I
was always informed as a boy--were the stones which St. Kevern threw
after St. Just when the latter stole his host's chalice and paten, and
ran away with them to the Land's End. Why not? Before we knew anything
about the action of icebergs and glaciers, that is, until the last eighty
years, that was as good a story as any other; while how lifelike these
boulders are, let a great poet testify; for the fact has not escaped the
delicate eye of Wordsworth:

"As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence;
Wonder to all who do the same espy,
By what means it could thither come, and whence,
So that it seems a thing endued with sense;
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself."

To the civilised poet, the fancy becomes a beautiful simile; to a savage
poet, it would have become a material and a very formidable fact. He
stands in the valley, and looks u