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: