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.
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