A mountain? He is a great stupid giant, with a perpetual cold in his
head, whose highest ambition is to give you one also. As for his
beauty, no natural object has so little of its own; he owes it to the
earthquakes that reared him up, to the rains and storms which have
furrowed him, to every gleam and cloud which pass over him. In
himself he is a mere helpless stone-heap. Our old Scandinavian
forefathers were right when they held the mountain Yotuns to be
helpless pudding-headed giants, the sport of gods and men: and their
English descendant, in spite of all his second-hand sentiment, holds
the same opinion at his heart; for his first instinct, jolly honest
fellow that he is, on seeing a snow alp, is to scramble up it and
smoke his cigar upon the top. And this great stupid braggart,
pretending to be a personage and an entity, which, like Pope's
monument on Fish-street hill,


"Like a tall bully, lifts the head and lies,"


I am called upon now-a-days to worship, as my better, my teacher.
Shall I, the son of Odin and Thor, worship Hrymir the frost giant,
and his cows the waterfalls? Shall I bow down to the stock of a
stone? My better? I have done an honest thing or two in my life,
but I never saw a mountain do one yet. As for his superiority to me,
in what does it consist? His strength? If he be stronger than I,
let him cut stones out of my ribs, as I can out of his. His size?
Am I to respect a mountain the more for being 10,000 feet high? As
well ask me to respect Daniel Lambert for weighing five-and-twenty
stone. His cunning construction? There is not a child which plays
at his foot, not an insect which basks on his crags, which is not