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 bad reasons, or for no reason at all, save the
passion of imitation. Not in them, but in the savage, can we see man as
he is by nature, the puppet of his senses and his passions, the natural
slave of his own fears.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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