Traherne is remarkable in many ways, but for nothing more than for his mingling of man and nature in the celestial light of infancy. He begins, indeed, with the corn--the “orient and immortal wheat”--but he goes on to the dust and stones and gates of the town, and then to the old men and the young men and the children. But it was only on “some gilded cloud or flower” that Vaughan saw “some shadows of eternity”; he longs to travel back to his childish time and to a city of the soul, but a shady city of palm-trees. Wordsworth, though he says that “every common spirit” was “apparell’d in celestial light” in his early childhood, only mentions “meadow, grove and stream”; it is a tree, a single field, a flower, that reminds him of his loss; it is the fountains, meadows, hills and groves which he is anxious to assure of his lasting love. Perhaps many people’s memories in this kind are of Nature more than of men. Even the social Lamb is at his deepest in recalling the child who was solitary in the great house and garden of Blakesmoor. With some the reason for this priority of Nature is that her solitudes are the most rich. The presence of other children and of adults is comparatively commonplace, and in becoming, permanently or temporarily, part of a community, the spirit makes some sacrifice. Provided, then, that a child is happy and at ease in the solitude of Nature, it is more open than in company to what is afterwards regarded as spiritual intercourse. But above all, our memories of Nature are seldom or never flawed by the seeming triviality, the dislikes, the disgusts, the misunderstandings which give to memories of human society something of dulness and the commonplace. Thinking of ourselves and other children, we may also think of things which make idealization impossible. Thinking of ourselves in a great wood or field of flowers ever so long ago, it is hard not to exaggerate whatever give-and-take there was between the spirit of the child and the vast pure forces of the sun and the wind. In those days we did not see a tree as a column of a dark stony substance supporting a number of green wafers that live scarcely half a year, and grown for the manufacture of furniture, gates, and many other things; but we saw something quite unlike ourselves, large, gentle, of foreign tongue, without locomotion, yet full of the life and movement and sound of the leaves themselves, and also of the light, of the birds, and of the insects; and they were givers of a clear, deep joy that cannot be expressed. The brooding mind easily exalts this joy with the help of the disillusions and the knowledge and the folly and the thought of later years. A little time ago I heard of the death of one whom I had once seemed to know well, had roamed and talked and been silent with him, and I should have gone on doing so had he not gone far away and died. And when I heard of his death I kept on recalling his face and figure to my mind under familiar