Stepping stone

“ I muttered; and then, feeling that if I hesitated I should fail, I took my leap, struck the water with a tremendous splash, and then went down like an arrow, lower and lower till quite in dismay I unclasped my hands from the stone and rose rapidly to the surface. "It's easy enough," I thought, as my head shot into the sunshine; and, climbing back, I took the other stone, contriving to glide off from close to the surface with the weight nipped between my knees. ”

“ As you have marked an elaborately-carved stone sink slowly from its ponderous 'drop' to its place in an edifice which is to stand for ages, did you never scan closely its grained streaks, its delicate chissellings, with the thought that when you were senseless clay, that very stone might arrest the eye of another, gazing upon it with sensations like your own? ”

“ Now the stone, that was balanced on the very verge of the declivity, trembled beneath them, and now, slowly and majestically as a vessel starting from her slips when the launching cord is severed, it began to move down the icy way. ”

“ And standing there beside a mass of crumbled granite, gray like the stone itself, his hulking body naked, neither clad nor furred, incredibly long arms now swinging as his weak eyes focused under bone-ridged brows, a man—though not a man—was raising in his ugly hand a shining tubelike object. ”

“ Thou sawest until that a stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, which smote the image upon the feet that was part of iron and part of clay, and brake them to pieces, then was the iron, the clay, the silver, the brass and the gold all broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floor, and the wind carried them away, and there was no place found for them, but the stone that smote the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. ”

“ Then came the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when granite was in demand for gateposts, and every standing stone serviceable was ruthlessly carried away. Almost every circle of upright stones has lost some of its finest blocks in this way, and all that is left to show where they were is the hole cut in the "calm" from which they were extracted, and the spalls or chips made by the quarrymen as they knocked the block into shape. ”

“ Not so; at least to any one who knows the look of a hard stone. You may, by rustication, make your good marble or granite look like wet slime, honeycombed by sand-eels, or like half-baked tufo covered with slow exudation of stalactite, or like rotten claystone coated with concretions of its own mud; but not like the stones of which the hard world is built. Do not think that nature rusticates her foundations. ”

“ Of the terrible difficulties of the excavations, where such large pieces of stone are met with, only those can have any idea who have been present at the work and have seen how much time and trouble it takes, especially during the present rainy weather—first to get out the small stones round one of the many immense blocks, then to dig out the block itself, to get the lever under it, to heave it up and roll it through the mud of the channel to the steep declivity. ”

“ Even if you have never learnt much of what is called geology, by keeping your eyes open and your mind awake you may see a great deal in the stones which have perhaps seemed to you most uninteresting. A block of granite from one of the Dartmoor hills, and a piece of slate from a Welsh quarry—how different these two kinds of stone are! We see this at once; but they become much more interesting when we know that each has its own history. ”

“ Trees, clouds, and rivers are enjoyable even by the careless; but the stone under his foot has, for carelessness, nothing in it but stumbling; no pleasure is languidly to be had out of it, nor food, nor good of any kind; nothing but symbolism of the hard heart, and the unfatherly gift. And yet, do but give it some reverence and watchfulness, and there is bread of thought in it, more than in any other lowly feature of all the landscape. For a stone, when it is examined, will be found a mountain in miniature. ”

“ Lifting toward the sky are vast buildings of stone, not the same kind of stone from which my forefathers fashioned their carven pipes and corn-pounders, but a grayer, grimier rock that would not take the polish we give by fingers dipped in sturgeon oil, and long days of friction with fine sand and deer-hide. ”

“ From the bottommost stone to the highest there is never a break in the perfect line; and the plain massive base of enormous quarried stones, some of which, they say, measure ten feet by three, passes into the light octagonal spire, covered with its curious coat of mail or fishes’ scales, by imperceptible and inevitable gradations. It is a triumph of sheer beauty of proportion unaided by the art of ornament. ”

“ There can be no doubt that every time the stone escaped them, they bounded quickly backwards, to keep their feet from being crushed by the refalling stone. Every time, the stone, abandoned by them, sunk deeper into the damp earth, which rendered the operation more and more difficult. ”

“ That manufactured objects of stone and iron have fallen from the sky:
That they have been brought down from a state of suspension, in a region of inertness to this earth's attraction, by atmospheric disturbances.
The "thunderstone" is usually "a beautifully polished, wedge-shaped piece of greenstone," says a writer in the Cornhill Magazine, 50-517. It isn't: it's likely to be of almost any kind of stone, but we call attention to the skill with which some of them have been made. ”

“ Broken masses of stone are heaped in the wildest confusion on every side, and all up the craggy slopes, a wilderness of grey stone, of which the aspect is painfully desolate, and, so to speak, ruined. ”

“ The stone is raised just for one instant with an easy backward sweep of hand and arm, and delivered with a twist that curls it on and on by degrees towards the spot required. Not just with sufficient strength perhaps, but aligned to the point. In an instant the skip is master of the situation. ”

“ If we knew that every colored stone we saw was natural, certain questions, conclusions, interests, would force themselves upon us without any effort of our own; but we have none of us time to stop in the midst of our daily business, to touch and pore over, and decide with painful minuteness of investigation, whether such and such a pillar be stucco or stone. And the whole field of this knowledge, which Nature intended us to possess when we were children, is hopelessly shut out from us. ”

“ On the other hand, set a stone to rolling that is unpolished and rough from the mountain side, and it will do great execution in its course, and leave a visible path behind it, and become smoother as it rolls. ”

“ In all countries the fundamental rock on which the boulder formation reposes, if it consists of granite, gneiss, marble, or other hard stone capable of permanently retaining any superficial markings which may have been imprinted upon it, is smoothed or polished, and exhibits parallel striae and furrows having a determinate direction. ”

“ The stronger and more skillful workmen hewed great blocks of granite, which were dragged to the place on wooden sledges; and, as they had no cranes to lift the stones into their places on the walls, they were obliged to build mounds of sand and rough bricks, and roll up each stone gradually with wooden levers, until they got it into its proper place. ”

“ It remains a doubt whether it be more marvellous or more perilous, that soft and flowing water should be invested with such a stiffness, as by a sudden change to transmute into the nature of stone whatsoever is put to it and drenched with its reeking fume, nought but the shape surviving. ”

“ Great stones were thrown up as from a volcano, some of them, great masses of hard stone, squared and grooved with implements wrought by human hands, breaking up and splitting in mid air as though riven by some infernal power. ”

“ Many may be found by knocking with one’s heel upon the spot, whence there is a sound; others, by thrusting an iron rod into the earth. The species of the stone renders it useless to be wrought up in building, especially in this country, that abounds with more manageable stone for the purpose. From the regular figures of the stones, as well as their order of positure, the eyes of a spectator would have been charmed with the sight of this work when in perfection, and the whole plain open to the view: at present they are separated by hedge-rows, yards, orchards, and the like ”

“ INSTEAD of veering off and falling to the ground as from an impact with metal, the stone sank right through the surface of the Thing, as into a pool of protoplastic slime. When it reached the central core of the object, a more abundant life suddenly leaped and pulsed from center to circumference. Visible waves of sentient color circled round the solid stone. Stabbing swords of light leaped forth from them, piercing the stone, crumbling it, absorbing it. ”

“ I spent many a day to find out a great stone big161 enough to cut hollow, and make it fit for a mortar, and could find none at all, except what was in the solid rock, and which I had no way to dig or cut out; nor indeed were the rocks in the island of hardness sufficient, but were all of a sandy crumbling stone, which neither would bear the weight of a heavy pestle or would break the corn without filling it with sand. ”

“ Rocking-stones.—Just on the borderland between the works of Nature and Art comes the so-called Rocking-stone, or Logan-stone, which is usually nothing more than an ice-transported boulder, poised so nicely on its rocky bed that gentle pressure by the hand may cause it to rock, or oscillate. ”

“ If a stone be found on which is graven or figured an armed man or the draped figure of a virgin, bound with laurel and having a laurel branch in her hand, this stone is sacred and frees the wearer from all changes and haps of fortune.
When thou findest a stone on which is graven the figure of a man holding a scythe in his hand, a stone like this imparts strength and power to the wearer. Every day adds to his strength, courage and boldness. ”

“ After a little they turned off toward a tremendous rock of solid granite that had been cleft smoothly in twain by some gigantic force of nature, and, walking between the towering walls of stone, came out on the farther side upon a small level space, where immense ferns and flags grew thickly in the rich soil, held in place and kept damp by the great cool masses of stone. ”

“ It is only on approaching it within a few yards that we find it to be an enormous stone, nearly thirty feet in length by almost fifteen feet in breadth, and in some places, though it thins, wedge-like, towards one of the edges, more than six feet in thickness,—forming altogether such a mass as the quarrier would detach from the solid rock to form the architrave of some vast gateway, or the pediment of some colossal statue. A cave-like excavation, nearly three feet square, and rather more than seven feet in depth, opens on its gray and lichened side. ”

“ The chipping out of celts and some other tools formed, not of flint, but of other hard rocks, must have been effected in the same manner. The stone employed is almost always of a more or less silicious nature, and such as breaks with a conchoidal fracture. ”

“ Even a tall man standing on the shoulders of another as tall would quite fail to touch the upper edge of the stone. If we give this marvelous monument the same age as the Fermanagh circles, as we well may, this raising of a single boulder of one hundred tons, and balancing it in the air on the crest of massive pillars may give us some insight into the engineering skill of the men of ten thousand years ago. ”

“ In any case, the rough stone, even if only used for throwing at his enemy or killing his prey, was an essentially new departure in evolution, and sounded the keynote to all that followed down to our own times. ”

“ The Stone-cutter.—Stone-cutters procure their materials from the quarry-men, whose business it is to get out the stones from the quarries, in which they lie in beds, consisting either of strata piled upon each other, or of solid masses. Stones of any desirable dimensions are detached from the great mass of rock, by first drilling holes at suitable points, and then driving into them wedges with a sledge. ”

“ Then it is a stone put on the wall in its right place, and it is a good stone of the right quality. You have quarrelled with a neighbour, you have made it up, heartily and bear no more malice, that is a good stone;—forgiveness of injuries—a capital stone that won't let the water through. ”

“ The hewers are in the mountain, and quarrymen are in the quarry, every beam must be squared, every joint and tenon must be filed, every stone must be chiselled to its exact form and dimension, and should we succeed in all this according to the draft and plan, which the divine architect of the universe has furnished us, you shall soon see stone come to its stone, and beam to its beam, till the great temple of the Lord shall tower towards the heavens without the sound of a hammer. ”

“ The place where the lower or 12 inch course is above the Rock, should be made up with stone of the same quality as the Rock itself. These stones should be dove-tailed into the rock, and laid with pozzolano mortar, secured by the Roman cement, the same as the other; for if done with harder stone (should the [468] rock waste at all) it would resist the waves better than the soft, and occasion a more speedy waste of the other parts of the Rock than the Tower. ”

“ Stone work, which may be rough and uncemented, but should always be solid, may then be built up at the sides, and covered with a secure coping of stone. A floor and sloping sides of stone work, jointed with the previously described work, and well cemented, or laid in strong clay or mortar, may, with benefit, be carried a few feet beyond the outlet. ”