, 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 up at the boulder on the
far-off fells. He is puzzled by it. He fears it. At last he makes
up his mind. It is alive. As the shadows move over it, he sees it
move. May it not sleep there all day, and prowl for prey all night?
He had been always afraid of going up those fells; now he will never
go. There is a monster there.

Childish enough, no doubt. But remember that the savage is always a
child. So, indeed, are millions, as well clothed, housed, and
policed as ourselves--children from the cradle to the grave. But of
them I do not talk; because, happily for the world, their
childishness is so overlaid by the result of other men's manhood; by
an atmosphere of civilisation and Christianity which they have
accepted at second-hand as the conclusions of minds wiser than their
own, that they do all manner of reasonable things for b