Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 111, Vol. III, February 13, 1886

No. 111.—Vol. III.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 1886.
All the world has shrunk since the Golden Age of our childhood. Time was longer, and people were taller then. A wet day was the depth of despair and the end of all things; the hours also were longer, and a year from January to December lapsed slowly by, like the prehistoric ages. The future seemed to be bringing a measureless succession of such years until the gigantic height of grown-up people would be reached; but life was so long, it was hardly worth while to think about the mystery of growing to their height at last. Our old home has shrunk since those days; the rooms are smaller and darker; the streets, once familiar, would be narrower if we could see them now; the garden has shrunk too; the trees have been growing down; and the church spire is stumpy, as if Time had pushed its top lower, like a shutting telescope. Beyond the home circle who were part of our existence, the grown-up people of the Golden Age were a mysterious race. They cared no more for games or playthings; though we refused to believe that any length of years would make us cease to care for hide-and-seek among the gorse and the billows of fern, and for the mustering of tin armies or the acquisition of new toys. Not only were the grown-up people in a dried-up state of indifference to games and plays, but they actually laughed at things that were not in the least funny. They never cried; they never ran; they did not ask for pudding twice, though they might have it; they had learned all possible lessons long ago, and had managed to remember them for the rest of their lives, and they knew all about everything always.
But oh, the green world of those days! Have the green lanes since wound on through golden light and moving leaf-shadows? Have the cornfields been so broad beyond the hedges, such a sea of warm and breeze-swept yellow ripeness, flecked all along near the hedge-path with sparkling blue, and with blazing red poppies? Have the skies been so far away since, where the lark sang out of sight, and where, with our head on the grass, we made upward voyages among the towering white clouds in the clearness of breezy summer days? Have the summers burned the dusty roads so white? And has the milk been so sweet within sight of the sheds at a doorway under thatched eaves? Is the noontide stillness of the hot country, the siesta of the birds, as deep as it was then? Is the scent of the honeysuckle as strong, and the smell of the hay? Are there bright beetles in the hayfield yet, and are butterflies becoming extinct, compared with their old numbers? Is it possible to have hay-battles, now that there seem to be so many painful stubble-fields to traverse in this world of ours? Who will give us back the heart-thrill of our first sight of the mountains? Who will remind us of the actual refreshment of wading in the shallow sunny brook, or swinging over it from ropes tied to white-blossomed trees? Who will send us another song like our first hearing of the noise of the great unresting sea, or another sight like the first vision of its foam-fringed, sky-bounded, sun-dazzled waters? When the moon shone on the water then, one longed to look all night; when the winter stars were out, there was no pageant like the heaven of heavens. In that Golden Age the world might have been created and called good but yesterday, so new a world it was. We saw