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.
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