n the
destruction of the past. Its events and empires stand where they did,
and the mere relation of time is as it was. But that which has fallen
together, has fallen in, has fallen close, and lies in a little heap, is
the past itself--time--the fact of antiquity.

He has grown into a smaller world as he has grown older. There are no
more extremities. Recorded time has no more terrors. The unit of
measure which he holds in his hand has become in his eyes a thing of
paltry length. The discovery draws in the annals of mankind. He had
thought them to be wide.

For a man has nothing whereby to order and place the floods, the states,
the conquests, and the temples of the past, except only the measure which
he holds. Call that measure a space of ten years. His first ten years
had given him the illusion of a most august scale and measure. It was
then that he conceived Antiquity. But now! Is it to a decade of ten
such little years as these now in his hand--ten of his mature years--that
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