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
more fearfully and wonderfully made; while as for his grandeur of
form, any college youth who scrambles up him, peel him out of his
shooting jacket and trousers, is a hundred times more beautiful, and
more grand too, by all laws of art.
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