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. Childhood is itself Antiquity--to
every man his only Antiquity. The recollection of childhood cannot make
Abraham old again in the mind of a man of thirty-five; but the beginning
of every life is older than Abraham. _There_ is the abyss of time. Let
a man turn to his own childhood--no further--if he would renew his sense
of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.

For in childhood change does not go at that mere hasty amble; it rushes;
but it has enormous space for its flight. The child has an apprehension
not only of things far off, but of things far apart; an illusive
apprehension when he is learning "ancient" history--a real apprehension
when he is conning his own immeasurable infancy. If there is no
historical Antiquity worth speaking of, this is the renewed and
unnumbered Antiquity for all mankind.

And it is of this--merely of this--that "ancient" history seems to
partake. Rome was founded when we began Roman history, and that i