I have seen it
look like an ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in an ordinary sensible
Prussian blue sky; and I have once seen it so naked and ruinous-looking,
so strangely lit up, that it looked like a Gruyere cheese,
that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible holes in it,
as if it had come in boiling unnatural milk from mysterious and
unearthly cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green;
and I incline to the opinion that the moon is not old enough.
The moon, like everything else, will ripen by the end of the world;
and in the last days we shall see it taking on those volcanic
sunset colours, and leaping with that enormous and fantastic life.
But this is a parenthesis; and one perhaps slightly lacking in
prosaic actuality. Whatever may be the value of the above speculations,
the phrase about the moon and green cheese remains a good example
of this imagery of eating and drinking on a large scale.
The same huge fancy is in the phrase "if all the trees were bread
and cheese," which I have cited elsewhere in this connection;
and in that noble nightmare of a Scandinavian legend, in
which Thor drinks the deep sea nearly dry out of a horn.
In an essay like the present (first intended as a paper to be read
before the Royal Society) one cannot be too exact; and I will concede
that my theory of the gradual vire-scence of our satellite is to be
regarded rather as an alternative theory than as a law finally
demonstrated and universally accepted by the scientific world.
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