the world with misery; to be simple, after having found out the charm and the wisdom of simplicity; to have—in a word—not childhood as it is, but as it would be, if we with our present knowledge could begin again:—this is what is wished for. This, too, is the secret of the sympathetic touch in Gray’s well-known welcome of the breeze from the school of his boyhood, that breeze that came from the happy hills, the fields beloved in vain: I feel the gales that from ye blow A momentary bliss bestow, As waving fresh their gladsome wing, My weary soul they seem to soothe, And, redolent of joy and youth, To breathe a second spring. That second spring would be boyhood with manhood’s knowledge—an impossible existence, a Golden Age that never was. It was because of the grim troop of passions and diseases waiting ‘in the vale below,’ that Gray envied the boyhood that had not yet advanced to meet the strife and miseries of the world. We call that Golden Age ‘the happiest time,’ merely by contrast; we forget its small capacity for happiness, its shallow understanding of the worth of those good things that we envy; and we apostrophise it in poetry and prose, because we are condemning the after-time as unhappy, without remembering our increased capacity for happiness. But if it be impossible to carry back to a new start in life the experience life has given us, while we are thinking with a sad fascination of that Golden Age, and feeling the ‘momentary bliss’ of recollection, we shall not find it impossible to reverse our aspirations, and to combine with later life some part, and perhaps the best part, of our young life’s treasures. We yearn for those two things together—the happiness of the beginning, and the light upon it from the experience of the end. We cannot go back; but why should we not gather again and bring forward with us all that can be brought from the Golden Age? Then, to some extent, our aspirations will be satisfied.