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mine and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the World was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. . . . So that with much ado I was corrupted and made to learn the dirty devices of this world. Which now I unlearn, and become as it were a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.

All the critics, again, send us harking back from Wordsworth’s great Ode, to compare it with Vaughan’s exquisite Retreat:—

Happy those early days when I
Shined in my Angel-infancy! . . .
When yet I had not walk’d above
A mile or two from my first Love,
And looking back, at that short space,
Could see a glimpse of His bright face:
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of Eternity. . .

But Wordsworth did more than merely revive a lovely fancy out of the dust of eighteenth-century rationalism. He did, up to a point, about the best thing a poet can do; he told men something they all knew concerning

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