men give the dignity of a century? They call it an age; but what if life
shows now so small that the word age has lost its gravity?

In fact, when a child begins to know that there is a past, he has a most
noble rod to measure it by--he has his own ten years. He attributes an
overwhelming majesty to all recorded time. He confers distance. He, and
he alone, bestows mystery. Remoteness is his. He creates more than
mortal centuries. He sends armies fighting into the extremities of the
past. 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