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.