him conscience and a thousand god-like gifts."Happy those early days", Vaughan begins; "There was a time", begins Wordsworth, "when the earth seemed apparelled in celestial light." "Before I understood this place", continues Vaughan: "Blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized," says Wordsworth. "A white celestial thought," says Vaughan: "Heaven lies about us in our infancy," says Wordsworth. "A mile or two off I could see his face," says Vaughan: "Trailing clouds of glory do we come," says Wordsworth. "On some gilded cloud or flower, my gazing soul doth dwell an hour," says Vaughan: "The hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower," says Wordsworth. Wordsworth's poem is the profounder in its philosophy, as well as far the greater and lovelier in its poetry; but in the moral relation, Vaughan's poem is the more definite of the two, and gives us in its close, poor as that is compared with the rest of it, just what we feel is wanting in Wordsworth's-the hope of return to the bliss of childhood. We may be comforted for what we lose by what we gain; but that is not a recompence large enough to be divine we want both. Vaughan will be a child again. For the movements of man's life are in

spirals we go back whence we came, ever returning on our former times, only upon a higher level, on the next upward coil of the spiral, so that it is a going back and a going forward ever and both at once. Life is, as it were, a constant repentance, or thinking of it again: the childhood of the kingdom takes the place of the childhood of the brain, but comprises all that was lovely in the former delight. The heavenly children will subdue kingdoms, work righteousness, wax valiant in fight, rout the armes of the aliens, merry of heart as when in the nursery of this world they fought their fancied frigates, and defended their toy-battlements."" Brave and noble criticism if somewhat misty, not mystical, toward the close: yet scarcely to be received in toto. It surely is of the very last consequence to know that Wordsworth did possess a well-worn copy of Silex Scintillans : for else all were hap-hazard. Then one queries the more profound philosophy of the Ode as opposed to "The Retreate", seeing the philosophy of the Ode is identical with the philosophy of "The Retreate" and appeals to all fine consciousness. Then the concession that the moral relation of Vaughan's poem is the more definite asserts for

1 Antiphon pp 254-6.

him the truer insight if not the finer utterance, for I am not so foolish as to gainsay that the Ode does glorify' all it takes from The Retreate': but then it is it it glorifies, which is to be remembered. Fundamentally and in bewilderment must we reject the verdict on the close of "The Retreate." The close is superb even beyond anything even in Wordsworth, in its vision of the shady city of palm trees", or that Jerusalem the Golden, with "boys and girls playing in the streets", after which holy men have pantel ron the beginning. The last two lines are like the sudden ending of music,

"And when this dust falls to the urn
In that state I came return."

"The child shall die an hundred years old." (Isaiah lxv. 20). I wonder too that so exquisite a touch-as of Turner's light in the rift of a cloud-as "Bright shoots of everlastingness", was not marked and equally so that the extraordinary matterful poem of " 'Corruption, in the same subtle line of thought, escaped notice. Here is the opening, to which the Ode is nearer still:

"Sure it was so. Man in those early days

Was not all stone and earth;

He shin'd a little, and by those weak rays,

Had some glimpse of his birth.

He saw heaven o'er his head, and knew from

whence

He came condemnèd-hither;

And as first love draws strongest, so from hence
His mind sure progress'd thither."1

The same nice and nicely-worded subjectiveness and backward steps" that really is aspiration, informs "The Stone" and "Childehood" -a marvel and a joy-and "Quickness" and "The Dawning" and "The World" and "Resurrection and Immortality" and many others which beyond all question, went to 'feed' Wordsworth in his most august meditative moods.3

But even more splendid sights rose to the burd

1 Vol. I. pp. 103-5.

2 I place here, as before, the references to these pieces, trusting they will be turned to: The Stone, Vol. I., pp. 243-5: Childhood, ibid, pp. 254-5: Quicknes, ibid, p. 285: The Dawning, ibid, 124-126: The World, ibid, pp. 149-152: Resurrection and Immortality, ibid. pp. 33-37.

3 I don't know that it is worth-while, still it may interest some to know that an American poet, Henry Theodore Tuckerman, in a volume of Poems (Boston, 1851) has ventured to appropriate VAUGHAN's thinking, and with modesty that is admirable in recollection of

The

ened self-scrutinzing eye of the Silurist. "plain" of his own soul was girded as by the "everlasting hills" and the "powers of the world to come" lifted him high as Paul when 'caught up to the third heaven', with this difference that HENRY VAUGHAN found words wherewith to utter what he 'saw'. Take this magnificent symbol of Eternity and Time, comparable almost with God's own poem of Saturn and his rings, or the eyed-wheels that flashed before Ezekiel by Chebar:

"I SAW ETERNITY THE OTHER NIGHT,

LIKE A GREAT RING OF PURE AND ENDLESS LIGHT,
All calm as it was bright;

Milton, entitled his sorry nothing, Il Penseroso. Here is its opening:

Are we not exiles here?

Come there not o'er us memories of a clime

More genial and more dear

Than this of time?

When deep, vague wishes press

Upon the soul and prompt it to aspire,

A mystic loneliness,

And wild desire." (p. 100.)

See Appendix to this Essay for a curious statement of the opposite (if it be opposite) idea of SAMUEL ROGERS, the Poet.