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 {326} now I unlearn, and become, as
it were, a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of
God."[10]

How like an Angel came I down!
How bright are all things here!
When first among His works I did appear
O how their Glory did me crown!
The World resembled His _Eternity_
In which my soul did walk;
And everything that I did see
Did with me talk.[11]

Long time before
I in my mother's womb was born,
A God preparing did this glorious store,
The world, for me adorne.
Into this Eden so divine and fair
So wide and bright, I come His son and heir.[12]

Like Vaughan, who, in his "angel-infancy," could

In these weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity,

and who

Felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness,[13]

Traherne not only saw, in his paradise-innocence, the glory of the
earth and sky--the streets paved with golden stones, and boys and girls
with lovely shining faces--but he also felt that he was part of a
deeper world which lay about his infancy and wooed him with love.

O Lord I wonder at Thy Love,
Which did my Infancy so early move.[14]

And out of this childhood experience, which many a meditative child can
match, he insists that God visited him.

He did Approach, He did me woo;
I wonder that my God this thing would do.

He in our childhood with us walks,
And with our thoughts Mysteriously He talks;
He often visiteth our Minds.[15]

{327}

I know of no one who has borne a louder testimony than Traherne to the
divine inheritances and spiritual possibilities of the new-born child,
or who has more emphatically denied the fiction of total depravity: "I
speak it in the presence of God," he says, "and of our Lord Jesus
Christ; in my pure primitive Virgin Light, while my apprehensions were
natural and unmixed, I cannot remember but that I was ten thousand
times more prone to good and excellent things than to evil."[16] And
he adds this impressive word on the doctrine of inheritance: "It is not
our parents' loins, so much as our parents' lives, that enthrals and
blinds us."[17]

After a happy childhood, during which "The Earth did undertake the
office of a Priest,"[18] and when his soul was

A living endless eye
Just