111 Alice Meynell, The Colour of Life (1896), ‘The Illusion of Historic Time’: ‘When a child begins to know there is a past, he has a most noble rod to measure it by–he has his own ten years. He attributes an overwhelming majesty to all recorded time. He confers distance. He, and he alone, bestows mystery. Remoteness is his. He creates more than mortal centuries. He sends armies fighting into the extremities of the past. He assigns the Parthenon to a hill of ages, and the temples of Upper Egypt to sidereal time. If there were no child, there would be nothing old. He, having conceived old time, communicates a remembrance at least of the mystery to the mind of man’ (pp. 89–90).