In like manner, in going through this book of mine after so many years I am amused at the way it is colored by the little cults and crazes, and modes of thought of the ‘eighties of the last century. Most amusing are the dead ones who take themselves seriously, whose books are pulpits quaintly carved and decorated with precious stones and silken canopies in which they stand and preach to or at their contemporaries. For what could I say of him that is not known to every one-that he is the tallest of fowls, land or water, of a most singular shape, and has black-tipped crimson wings folded under his delicate rose-colored plumage? These other books referred to, written, let us say, from thirty or forty years to a century or two ago, amuse us in a way their poor dead authors never intended. I am not referring to living authors least of all to that flamingo of letters who for the last decade or so has been a wonder to our island birds. Nevertheless we cannot suppress all curiosity, or help asking one another, What is your dream-your ideal? What is your News from Nowhere, or, rather, what is the result of the little shake your hand has given to the old pasteboard toy with a dozen bits of colored glass for contents? And, most important of all, can you present it in a narrative or romance which will enable me to pass an idle hour not disagreeably? How, for instance, does it compare in this respect with other prophetic books on the shelf? The vast, unbounded prospect lies before us, but, as the poet mournfully adds, clouds and darkness rest upon it. Our mental atmosphere surrounds and shuts us in like our own skins no one can boast that he has broken out of that prison. The picture put before us is false we knew it would be false before looking at it, since we cannot imagine what is unknown any more than we can build without materials. Romances of the future, however fantastic they may be, have for most of us a perennial if mild interest, since they are born of a very common feeling-a sense of dissatisfaction with the existing order of things, combined with a vague faith in or hope of a better one to come.

A Crystal Age by William Henry Hudson