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Wordsworth and Hermes Trismegistus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edward Chauncey Baldwin
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Extract

At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, which has aptly been called “the century of the child,” a new sense of the sacredness of childhood found expression in Wordsworth's song written in 1802:

      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.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , 1918 , pp. 235 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1918

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References

1 Cf. the Cambridge Edition of Wordsworth.

2 Knight's Ed., Wordsworth's Poetical Works, v, pp. 400 ff.

3 Compare Ecclesiastical Sonnets, xvi: “Man's life is like a Sparrow,” and the Answer to the Letter of Mathetes, published in The Friend in 1809, in which he restates the main theme of the Ode.

4 Ode On Intimations, 110–113.

5 Ode On Intimations, 66–68.

6 Coleridge's sonnet xvii beginning “Oft o'er my brain does that strange fancy roll” expresses a belief in a prenatal life, and may have been in part due to the author's reading of Hermes. The latter he mentions (letter to Thelwall, Nov. 19, 1796) as one of “my darling studies.”

7 Henry Vaughan's Works, in Puller Worthies Library, Vol. ii, pp. lxii-lxviii.

8 Il Penseroso, 88.

9 Milton almost certainly had read the Hermetic books.

10 Hudibras, 2, 3, 651 ff.

11 Butler's notes to Hudibras in the edition of 1674 show not only a careful reading, but that Vaughan's preposterous assertions regarding the antiquity of magic and the “heavenly chaos,” furnished the basis for some of the gibes against the Rosicrucians in the character of Ralpho (Hudibras, i, 1, 531–532). Moreover, Butler's character of An Hermetic Philosopher (Butler's Remains, ii, p. 225, Thyer's edition) is obviously inspired by Vaughan's book.

12 Way's Translation, Vol. iii, p. 345.

13 Lecky, European Morals, ii, p. 27.

14 Natural History, iv, 29.

15 De Ira, v, 15.

16 Divine Institutes, Bk. 6, Chap. 20.

17 To ascribe it wholly to them would be, of course, absurd; for the reverence for childhood that came into modern life from the mystics was immensely strengthened by the teachings of Jesus. Unquestionably He lifted to a higher plane our whole conception of childhood. By making the helplessness of children an emblem of the dependence of God's people upon His love and care, Jesus threw a kind of halo over childhood itself that has reacted upon men's thought of it.