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 The earth and every common sight Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. But the glory and the freshness were in ourselves. Wordsworth calls it the hour ‘of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.’ Not all the splendour has departed; the sun of those days and the light of our first love are still lingering in the sunlight of to-day. George Eliot tells us how a forest of young golden-brown oak branches with the light gleaming through, and with ground-ivy and blue speedwell and white star-flowers below, is more beautiful to the heart than all the grandeur of tropical forests, because it holds ‘the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood had left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine or the deep-bladed grass might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.’