JUNE 125 



trees, the groups of wayside aspen, the line of horse- 

 chestnuts, the wych-elms on both sides of the road, the 

 one delicate sycamore before the inn and the company of 

 sycamores above the cross — the spacious thatch and tiles 

 of the farmyard quadrangle — the day newly painted in 

 white and blue — the green so green in the hedges, and 

 the white and purple so pure in the flowers — all seem to 

 be meant for eyes that know nothing of Time and of 

 what "brought death into the world and all our woe." 

 And in this solitude the young birds are very happy. 

 They have taken possession of the thick hedges, of the 

 roadside grass, of the roads themselves. They flutter and 

 run and stumble there; they splash in the pools and in 

 the dust, which not a wheel nor a foot has marked. 

 These at least are admitted into the kingdom along with 

 that strange wildfowl that lives " to maintain the trade 

 and mystery of typographers." 



Such a day, in the unblemished summer land, invariably 

 calls up thoughts of the Golden Age. As mankind has 

 looked back to a golden age, so the individual, repeating 

 the history of the race, looks back and finds one in his 

 own past. Historians and archaeologists have indeed made 

 it difficult for men of our time to look far back for a 

 golden age. We are shown a skull with supraciliary 

 prominences and are told that its owner, though able to 

 survive the mammoth by means of tools of flint, lived like 

 the Tasmanian of modern times; and his was no Golden 

 Age. Then we look back to heroic ages which poetry 

 and other arts have magnified — to the Greece of Homer 

 or Pheidias, to the Ireland of Cuchulain, to the Wales of 

 Arthur, to the England which built the great cathedrals 

 or produced Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, Izaak Walton. 



