Together they have wrought from the first hour, and
civilisation, with all the circle of its arts, is their joint handiwork.
In the atmosphere of our rich modern fellowship with Nature, the
unwritten poetry to which every open heart falls heir, we forget our
earliest dependence on the great mother and the lessons she taught when
men gathered about her knee in the childhood of the world. Not a spade
turned the soil, not an axe felled a tree, not a path was made through
the forest, that did not leave, in the man whose arm put forth the
toil, some moral quality. In the obstacles which she placed in their
pathway, in the difficulties with which she surrounded their life, the
wise mother taught her children all the lessons which were to make them
great. It was no easy familiarity which she offered them, no careless
bestowal of bounty upon dependents; she met them as men, and offered
them a perpetual alliance upon such terms as great and equal sovereigns
proffer and accept. She gave much, but she asked even more than she
offered, and in the first moment of intercourse she struck in men that
lofty note of sovereignty which has never ceased to thrill the race
with mysterious tones of power and prophecy. Men have stood erect and
fearless in the presence of the most awful revelations of the forces of
Nature, affirming by their very attitude a supremacy of spirit which no
preponderance of power can overshadow.
Pages:
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31