wonder, as I said, is always to me the delicacy of touch.  I cut a block of the Saleve limestone from the edge of one of the principal faults which have formed the precipice; it is a lovely compact limestone, and the fault itself is filled up with a red breccia, formed of the crushed fragments of the torn rock, cemented by a rich red crystalline paste.  I have had the piece I cut from it smoothed, and polished across the junction; here it is; and you may now pass your soft little fingers over the surface, without so much as feeling the place where a rock which all the hills of England might have been sunk in the body of, and not a summit seen, was torn asunder through that whole thickness, as a thin dress is torn when you tread upon it.

(The audience examine the stone, and touch it timidly, but the matter remains inconceivable to them.)

Mary (struck by the beauty of the stone).  But this is almost marble?

L. It is quite marble.  And another singular point in the business, to my mind, is that these stones, which men have been cutting into slabs, for thousands of years, to ornament their principal buildings with,—­and which, under the general name of “marble,” have been the delight of the eyes, and the wealth of architecture, among all civilized nations,—­are precisely those on which the signs and brands of these earth agonies have been chiefly struck; and there is not a purple vein nor flaming zone in them, which is not the record of their ancient torture.  What a boundless capacity for sleep, and for serene stupidity, there is in the human mind!  Fancy reflective beings, who cut and polish stones for three thousand years, for the sake of the pretty stains upon them; and educate themselves to an art at last (such as it is), of imitating these veins by dexterous painting; and never a curious soul of them, all that while, asks, “What painted the rocks?”

(The audience look dejected, and ashamed of themselves.)

The fact is, we are all, and always, asleep, through our lives; and it is only by pinching ourselves very hard that we ever come to see, or understand, anything.  At least, it is not always we who pinch ourselves; sometimes other people pinch us; which I suppose is very good of them,—­or other things, which I suppose is very proper of them.  But it is a sad life; made up chiefly of naps and pinches.

(Some of the audience, on this, appearing to think that the others require pinching, the lecturer changes the subject.)

Now, however, for once, look at a piece of marble carefully, and think about it.  You see this is one side of the fault; the other side is down or up, nobody knows where; but, on this side, you can trace the evidence of the dragging and tearing action.  All along the edge of this marble, the ends of the fibers of the rock are torn, here an inch, and there half an inch, away from each other; and you see the exact places where they fitted, before they were torn