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THE RETREAT.
Happy those early days when I
Shined in my angel-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white, celestial thought;
When yet I had not walked 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;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A several sin to every sense;
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
O how I long to travel back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain
Where first I left my glorious train,
From whence the enlightened spirit sees
That shady city of palm-trees.
But ah! my soul with too much stay
Is drunk, and staggers in the way!
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move;
And when this dust falls to the urn,
In that state I came return.
Let any one who is well acquainted with Wordsworth's grand ode--that on
the Intimations of Immortality--turn his mind to a comparison between
that and this: he will find the resemblance remarkable. Whether The
Retreat suggested the form of the Ode is not of much consequence, for
the Ode is the outcome at once and essence of all Wordsworth's
theories; and whatever he may have drawn from The Retreat is glorified
in the Ode. Still it is interesting to compare them. Vaughan believes
with Wordsworth and some other great men that this is not our first stage
of existence; that we are haunted by dim memories of a former state. This
belief is not necessary, however, to sympathy with the poem, for whether
the present be our first life or no, we have come from God, and bring
from him conscience and a thousand godlike 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 would 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
grander 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 recompense
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 traces, 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 armies of the aliens,
merry of heart as when in the nursery of this world they fought their
fancied frigates, and defended their toy-battlements.
Here are the beginning and end of another of similar purport:
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