e'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 the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Hear what Henry Vaughan says:--

Happy those early dayes, when I
Shin'd in my angell-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white, celestiall thought;
When yet I had not walkt 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 flowre
My gazing soul would dwell an houre,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinfull sound,
Or had the black art to dispence
A sev'rall sinne to ev'ry sence,
But felt through all this fleshly dresse
Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.
O how I long to travell back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plaine,
Where first I left my glorious traine;
From whence th' inlightned spirit sees
That shady City of palme trees.

Whoever has thus gazed on flower or cloud; whoever can recall poorest
memory of the trail of glory that hung about his childhood, must have
some faint idea how his father's house and the things in it always
looked, and must still look to the Lord. With him there is no fading
into the light of common day. He has never lost his childhood, the very
essence of childhood being nearness to the Father and the outgoing of
his creative love; whence, with that insight of his eternal childhood of
which the insight of the little ones here is a fainter repetition, he
must see everything as the Father means it. The child sees things as the
Father means him to see them, as he thought of them when he uttered
them. For God is not only the father of the c