rable sentence, Gentlemen, is the real text of my
discourse to-day. I lay no sentimental stress upon Wordsworth's
Ode and its doctrine that 'Heaven lies about us in our infancy.'
It was, as you know, a favourite doctrine with our Platonists of
the 17th century: and critics who trace back the Ode "Intimations
of Immortality" to Henry Vaughan's

Happy those early days, when I
Shined in my Angel-infancy.

might connect it with a dozen passages from authors of that
century. Here is one from "Centuries of Meditations" by that poor
Welsh parson, Thomas Traherne, whom I quoted to you the other
day:

Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the
womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the
best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe. By the
Gift of God they attended me into the world, and by His
special favour I remember them till now.... Certainly Adam
in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions
of the world, than I when I was a child.

And here is another from John Earle's Character of 'A Child' in
his "Microcosmography":

His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein
he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember; and
sighs to see what innocence he has out-liv'd. He is the
Christian's example, and the old man's relapse: the one
imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his
simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little coat,
he had got Eternity without a burthen, and exchang'd but one
Heaven for another.

Bethinking me again of 'the small apple-eating urchin whom we
know,' I suspect an amiable fallacy in all this: I doubt if when
he scales an apple-bearing tree which is neither his own nor his
papa's he does so under impulse of any conscious yearning back to
Hierusalem, his happy home,

Where trees for evermore bear fruit.

At any rate, I have an orchard, and he has put up many excuses,
but never yet that he was recollecting Sion.

Still the doctrine holds affinity with the belief which I firmly
hold and tried to explain to you with persuasion last term:
that, boy or man, you and I, the microcosms, do--sensibly,
half-sensibly, or insensibly--yearn, through what we feel to be
best in us, to 'join up' with the greater harmony; that by poetry
or religion or whatnot we have that within us which craves to be
drawn out, 'e-ducated,' and linked up.

Now the rule of the nursery in the last century rest