In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes
that seem to contradict the idea that there is even such a thing as a
level, and make us all realize that we live on a planet with a sloping
roof, you will come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with
loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose.
The whole might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. It
is often difficult to believe that such cosmic refuse can have come
together except by human means. The mildest and most cockney imagination
conceives the place to be the scene of some war of giants. To me it is
always associated with one idea, recurrent and at last instinctive. The
scene was the scene of the stoning of some prehistoric prophet, a
prophet as much more gigantic than after-prophets as the boulders are
more gigantic than the pebbles. He spoke some words--words that seemed
shameful and tremendous--and the world, in terror, buried him under a
wilderness of stones. The place is the monument of an ancient fear.

If we followed the same mood of fancy, it would he more difficult to
imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth
that primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried
under the brutal stones. For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare.
Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more
commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation--it is
a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I. in the primer of
minor poetry. It was not, assuredly, for such babyish solemnities that
our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world. If we
weigh the matter in the faultless scales of imagination, if we see what
is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he
was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang
in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has
not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the