Wahre dir den Kindersinn, Kindheit blüht in Liebe bin, Kinderzeit ist heil'ge Zeit, Heidenkindheit--Christenheit. --_B. Goltz_. Happy those early days, when I Shined in my angel infancy. --_Henry Vaughan_. Childhood shall be all divine.--_B. W. Proctor_. But Heaven is kind, and therefore all possess, Once in their life, fair Eden's simpleness.--_H. Coleridge_. But to the couch where childhood lies, A more delicious trance is given, Lit up by rays from seraph eyes, And glimpses of remembered heaven.--_W. M. Praed_. O for boyhood's time of June, Crowding years in one brief moon!--_Whittier_. _Golden Age_. The English word _world_, as the Anglo-Saxon _weorold_, Icelandic _veröld_, and Old High German _weralt_ indicate, signified originally "age of man," or "course of man's life," and in the mind of the folk the life of the world and the life of man have run about the same course. By common consent the golden age of both was at the beginning, _ab ovo_. With Wordsworth, unlettered thousands have thought:-- "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" _Die Kindheit ist ein Augenblick Gottes_, "childhood is a moment of God," said Achim Ton Arnim, and Hartley Coleridge expresses the same idea in other words:-- "But Heaven is kind, and therefore all possess, Once in their life, fair Eden's simpleness." This belief in the golden age of childhood,--_die heilige Kinderzeit_, the heaven of infancy,--is ancient and modern, world-wide, shared in alike by primitive savage and nineteenth-century philosopher. The peasant of Brittany thinks that children preserve their primal purity up to the seventh year of their age, and, if they die before then, go straight to heaven (174. 141), and the great Chinese philosopher, linking together, as others have done since his time, the genius and the child, declared that a man is great only as he preserves the pure ideas of his childhood, while Coleridge, in like fashion tells us: "Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the power of manhood." Everywhere we hear the same refrain:-- "Aus der Jugendzeit, aus der Jugendzeit, Klingt ein Lied immerdar; O wie liegt so weit, o wie liegt so weit, Was mein einst war!" The Paradise that man lost, the Eden from which he has been driven, is not the God-planted Garden by the banks of Euphrates, but the "happy days of angel infancy," and "boyhood's time of June," the childhood out of which in the fierce struggle--for existence the race has rudely grown, and back to which, for its true salvation, it must learn to make its way again. As he, who was at once genius and child, said, nearly twenty centuries ago: "Except ye turn and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven."