the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, the firmness
of clay, must have sometimes wished that they were things to eat.
If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks; if only white firwood
were digestible! We talk rightly of giving stones for bread:
but there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles,
certain split stones of blue and green, that make me wish my
teeth were stronger.

Somebody staring into the sky with the same ethereal
appetite declared that the moon was made of green cheese.
I never could conscientiously accept the full doctrine.
I am Modernist in this matter. That the moon is made of cheese
I have believed from childhood; and in the course of every month
a giant (of my acquaintance) bites a big round piece out of it.
This seems to me a doctrine that is above reason, but not contrary
to it. But that the cheese is green seems to be in some degree
actually contradicted by the senses and the reason; first because
if the moon were made of green cheese it would be inhabited;
and second because if it were made of green cheese it would be green.
A blue moon is said to be an unusual sight; but I cannot think
that a green one is much more common. In fact, I think I have seen
the moon looking like every other sort of cheese except a green cheese.
I have seen it look exactly like a cream cheese: a circle of warm
white upon a warm faint violet sky above a cornfield in Kent.
I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese, rising a dull red
copper disk amid masts and dark waters at Honfleur. 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,