another time than this

I’m reading a book by Washington Irving, and in it he speaks of poetry that makes him think of “the honest days of yore in which I am apt to think the world was more homebred, social and joyous than its present.”

He wrote this in 1892. 1892! Before the helicopter, motorcycle, interstate system, automated factories, credit cards, telephones (?), airplanes, and of course the internet.

In 1892, when the most significant advancement was the steam engine (?), he thinks wistfully of “the honest days of yore.”

I guess we are always in someone else’s golden time. Or perhaps we are always idealistic about the time in which we do not live.