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he had really and truly found an artist to understand his mystery. (He put it more modestly, but that is what he meant.) I took leave to be incredulous; but in due course there appeared the now famous edition of the book, with Mr. Rackham’s drawings, and I recanted.
When Wordsworth told our Grandfathers or Great Grandfathers that
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
he was reviving what had been a favourite fancy with the old seventeenth-century writers, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, John Earle. “The elder he grows,” says Earle concerning a Child in his Microcosmography, “he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches . . . Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity without
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