and beliefs of each successive century will probably be, on the whole,
superior to those of any previous century. But this is not
universally true; the teaching of each generation does not thus sum
up the results of the whole past. And thus the child, to whom in a
certain sense the past of humanity is present,--who is living
through the whole life of the race in little, before he lives the
life of his century in large,--may possibly dimly apprehend something
more of truth in certain directions than is visible to the adults
around him.

But, thus qualified, the intuitions of infancy might seem scarcely
worth insisting on. And Wordsworth, as is well known, has followed
Plato in advancing for the child a much bolder claim. The child's
soul, in this view, has existed before it entered the body--has
existed in a world superior to ours, but connected, by the immanence
of the same pervading Spirit, with the material universe before our
eyes. The child begins by feeling this material world strange to him.
But he sees in it, as it were, what he has been accustomed to see;
he discerns in it its kinship with the spiritual world which he
dimly remembers; it is to him "an unsubstantial fairy place"--a scene
at once brighter and more unreal than it will appear in his eyes
when he has become acclimatized to earth. And even when this
freshness of insight has passed away, it occasionally happens that
sights or sounds of unusual beauty or carrying deep associations--a
rainbow, a cuckoo's cry, a sunset of extraordinary splendour--will
renew for a while this sense of vision and nearness to the spiritual
world--a sense which never loses its reality, though with advancing
years its presence grows briefer and more rare.

Such, then, in prosaic statement is the most characteristic message