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 those hours, but he is not interested in it.  It is the inexperienced child who passes with simplicity through the marginal country; and the thing he meets there is principally the yet further conception of illimitable time.

His nurse’s lullaby is translated into the mysteries of time.  She sings absolutely immemorial words.  It matters little what they may mean to waking ears; to the ears of a child going to sleep they tell of the beginning of the world.  He has fallen asleep to the sound of them all his life; and “all his life” means more than older speech can well express.

Ancient custom is formed in a single spacious year.  A child is beset with long traditions.  And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back—­it is already so far.  That is, it looks as remote to the memory of a man of thirty as to that of a man of seventy.  What are a mere forty years of added later life in the contemplation of such a distance?  Pshaw!

EYES

There is nothing described with so little attention, with such slovenliness, or so without verification—­albeit with so much confidence and word-painting—­as the eyes of the men and women whose faces have been made memorable by their works.  The describer generally takes the first colour that seems to him probable.  The grey eyes of Coleridge are recorded in a proverbial line, and Procter repeats the word,