The Christian mystic invokes with equal
confidence his own memories of a state which seemed as yet to know
no sin:--
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 aught
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.
And Wordsworth, whose recollections were exceptionally vivid, and
whose introspection was exceptionally penetrating, has drawn from
his own childish memories philosophical lessons which are hard to
disentangle in a logical statement, but which will roughly admit of
being classed under two heads. For firstly, he has shown an unusual
delicacy of analysis in eliciting the "firstborn affinities that fit
our new existence to existing things;"--in tracing the first impact
of impressions which are destined to give the mind its earliest ply,
or even, in unreflecting natures, to determine the permanent modes of
thought.
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