But it
was far otherwise with the annual cycle of the seasons. To any man a
year is a considerable period, seeing that the number of our years
is but few at the best. To the primitive savage, with his short
memory and imperfect means of marking the flight of time, a year may
well have been so long that he failed to recognise it as a cycle at
all, and watched the changing aspects of earth and heaven with a
perpetual wonder, alternately delighted and alarmed, elated and cast
down, according as the vicissitudes of light and heat, of plant and
animal life, ministered to his comfort or threatened his existence.
In autumn when the withered leaves were whirled about the forest by
the nipping blast, and he looked up at the bare boughs, could he
feel sure that they would ever be green again? As day by day the sun
sank lower and lower in the sky, could he be certain that the
luminary would ever retrace his heavenly road? Even the waning moon,
whose pale sickle rose thinner and thinner every night over the rim
of the eastern horizon, may have excited in his mind a fear lest,
when it had wholly vanished, there should be moons no more.
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