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 the man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day.

Wordsworth--though he had not the inestimable advantage of a
nineteenth-century education and the inheritance of the Darwinian
philosophy--does nevertheless put the matter of the Genius of the Child
in a way which (with the alteration of a few conventional terms) we
scientific moderns are quite inclined to accept. We all admit now that
the Child does not come into the world with a mental tabula rasa of
entire forgetfulness but on the contrary as the possessor of vast stores
of sub-conscious memory, derived from its ancestral inheritances; we
all admit that a certain grace and intuitive insight and even prophetic
quality, in the child-nature, are due to the harmonization of these
racial inheritances in the infant, even before it is born; and that
after birth the impact of the outer world serves rather to break up
and disintegrate this harmony than to confirm and strengthen it. Some
psychologists indeed nowadays go so far as to maintain that the child
is not only 'Father of the man,' but superior to the man, (1) and that
Boyhood and Youth and Maturity are attained to not by any addition but
by a process of loss and subtraction. It will be seen that the last ten
lines of the above quotation rather favor this view.

(1) "Man in the course of his life falls away more and more from
the specifically HUMAN type of his early years, but the Ape in the
course of his short life goes very much farther along the road of
degradation and premature senility." (Man and Woman, by Havelock Ellis,
p. 24).

But my object in making the quotation was not to insist on the truth
of its application to the individual Child, but rather to point out
the remarkable way in which it illustrates what I have said about the
Childhood of the Race. In fact, if the quotation be read over again with
this interpretation (which I do not say Wordsworth intended) that
the 'birth' spoken of is the birth or evolution of the distinctively
self-conscious Man fr