"The

:

I have another reason for presenting Retreate", that will appear immediately but apart from that and inevitable memories of WORDSWORTH, surely we have there some very remarkable scrutiny and interrogation of subtleties of our deepest spiritual being, such as were not frequent two hundred and fifty years ago or thereby. I ask the Reader to mark the intense yearning and feeling away back to child time in the poem : the resolute and almost awesome getting back again in maturity, thinkings and feelings and instinctaspirations long vanished, as of a lost tune returning in a dream. I don't know that anywhere in our elder Literature (out of Hamlet" with which comparison were simply idle) you can put your finger on finer utterance of what most would

have found un-utterable or utterable alone by music. Only one who had brooded and listened in the hush of conscious audience with himself, could so have put into words-and such words— the ordinarily inscrutable. Are not ninety-nine out of every hundred, even the two or three out of a thousand, who are fascinated by such introspection of their being, baffled in the effort to get back to their child-period and child-experience when fresh from God and only 'the shadow upon life' of the forbidden'? Of like fineness of feeling

and wording is a delicious little poem called "Childehood", a very apotheosis of child-life.1

Now look at "The Retreate" in its fruitfulness, a century and a half afterwards in WORDSWORTH: and which result were there nothing more would make HENRY VAUGHAN a benefactor in the region of our noblest Poetry. Let us read together the Ode on "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" that consummate flower of Wordsworth's genius. It can never be read too often:

"There was a time when meadow, grove, The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore ;-

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

and stream,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The Rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the Rose,

The Moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare,

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

1 Vol. I. pp. 254-5.

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,

And while the young lambs bound

As to the tabor's sound,

To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong:
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;

Land and sea

Give themselves up to jollity,

And with the heart of May

Doth every Beast keep holiday;

Thou Child of Joy.

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy

Shepherd-boy!

Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call

Ye to each other make; I see

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,

My head hath its coronal,

The fulness of your bliss, I feel-I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen

While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,

And the Children are culling

On every side,

In a thousand valleys far and wide,

Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm :-
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear !

-But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone :
The Pansy at my feet

Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar :

Not in entire forgetfulness.

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,

The homely Nurse doth all she can,
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from a father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment of his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral,

And this hath now his heart,

And unto this he frames his song :

Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife:

But it will not be long

Ere this be thrown aside,

And with new joy and pride

The little Actor cons another part;

Filling from time to time his “humourous stage
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,