s why
it seems long ago. Suppose the man of thirty-five heard, at that present
age, for the first time of Romulus. Why, Romulus would be nowhere. But
he built his wall, as a matter of fact, when every one was seven years
old. It is by good fortune that "ancient" history is taught in the only
ancient days. So, for a time, the world is magical.

Modern history does well enough for learning later. But by learning
something of antiquity in the first ten years, the child enlarges the
sense of time for all mankind. For even after the great illusion is over
and history is re-measured, and all fancy and flight caught back and
chastised, the enlarged sense remains enlarged. The man remains capable
of great spaces of time. He will not find them in Egypt, it is true, but
he finds them within, he contains them, he is aware of them. History has
fallen together, but childhood surrounds and encompasses history,
stretches beyond and passes on the road to eternity.

He has not passed in vain through the long ten years, the ten years that
are the treasury of preceptions--the first. The great disillusion shall
never shorten those years, nor set nearer together the days that made
them. "Far apart," I have said, and that "far apart" is wonderful. The
past of childhood is not single, is not motionless, nor fixed in one
point; it has summits a world away one from the other. Year from year
differs as the antiquity of Mexico from the antiquity of Chaldea. And
the man of thirty-five knows for ever afterwards what is flight, even
though he finds no great historic distances to prove his wings by.

There is a long and mysterious moment in long and mysterious childhood,
which is the extremest distance known to any human fancy. Many other
moments, many other hours, are long in the first ten years. Hours of
weariness are long--not with a mysterious length, but with a mere length
of protraction, so that the things called minutes and half-hours by the
elderly may be something else to their apparent contemporaries, the
children. The ancient moment is not merely one of these--it is a space
not of long, but of immeasurable, time. It is the moment of going to
sleep. The man knows that borderland, and has a contempt for it: he has
long ceased to find antiquity there. It has become a common enough
margin of dreams to him; and he does not attend to its phantasies. He
knows that he has a frolic spirit in his head which has its way at thos