"My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began, So is it now I am a man, So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man: And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety." Here we have reverence for the child developed to such an extent that it supplants reverence for age. But this conferring of his natural poetic rights on the child is, as the history of every country shows us, only one of the many signs of the reaction against the eighteenth century's worship of the enlightened, social human being, and its banishment of the child to the nursery. Wordsworth carries the reaction inaugurated by the nineteenth century to its logical conclusion. In one of his sonnets he describes a walk which he takes on a beautiful evening with a little girl. After describing the tranquil evening mood-- "The holy time is quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration;" he turns to the child beside him, and says: "Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here, If thou appear untouched by solemn thought Thy nature is not therefore less _divine_; Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year, And worship'st at the Temple's _inner shrine_, God being with thee when we know it not." The pious ending is inevitable with Wordsworth; but, as any intelligent reader may see for himself, it is only tacked on to the main idea, that of the child's own divine nature. In his famous _Ode on Intimations of Immortality_ Wordsworth develops this idea with a fervour of enthusiasm which carried him too great a length for even such a devotee of naïveté as Coleridge. A child of six he apostrophises thus:-- "Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie Thy soul's immensity; Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep Thy heritage; thou eye among the blind. That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the eternal Mind,-- Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! On whom those truths do rest Which we are toiling all our lives to find." These assertions are, doubtless, explained away in a poetico-philosophical manner by the subsequent attribution of the child's greatness to the fact that it stands nearer than we do to the life before birth, and, consequently, to the "intimations of immortality"; but even this is not to be taken as Wordsworth's literal meaning, if we are to believe an assertion of Coleridge's which remained uncontradicted by the author. The child is revered as earth's "foster-child," and "The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's priest."