ast. He assigns the Parthenon to a hill of ages, and the temples of
Upper Egypt to sidereal time.

If there were no child, there would be nothing old. He, having conceived
old time, communicates a remembrance at least of the mystery to the mind
of the man. The man perceives at last all the illusion, but he cannot
forget what was his conviction when he was a child. He had once a
persuasion of Antiquity. And this is not for nothing. The enormous
undeception that comes upon him still leaves spaces in his mind.

But the undeception is rude work. The man receives successive shocks. It
is as though one strained level eyes towards the horizon, and then were
bidden to shorten his sight and to close his search within a poor half
acre before his face. Now, it is that he suddenly perceives the hitherto
remote, remote youth of his own parents to have been something familiarly
near, so measured by his new standard; again, it is the coming of Attila
that is displaced. Those ten last years of his have corrected the world.
There needs no other rod than that ten years' rod to chastise all the
imaginations of the spirit of man. It makes history skip.

To have lived through any appreciable part of any century is to hold
thenceforth a mere century cheap enough. But, it may be said, the
mystery of change remains. Nay, it does not. Change that trudges
through our own world--our contemporary world--is not very mysterious. We
perceive its pace; it is a jog-trot. Even so, we now consider, jolted
the changes of the past, with the same hurry.

The man, therefore, who has intelligently ceased to be a child scans
through a shortened avenue the reaches of the past. He marvels that he
was so deceived. For it was a very deception. If the Argonauts, for
instance, had been children, it would have been well enough for the child
to measure their remoteness and their acts with his own magnificent
measure. But they were only men and demi-gods. Thus they belong to him
as he is now--a man; and not to him as he was once--a child. It was
quite wrong to lay the child's enormous ten years' rule along the path
from our time to theirs; that path must be skipped by the nimble yard in
the man's present possession. Decidedly the Argonauts are no subject for
the boy.

What, then? Is the record of the race nothing but a bundle of such
little times? Nay, it seems that childhood, which created the illusion
of ages, does actually prove it true.