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.