Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.
William Wordsworth
These lines are always, at the same time, both familiar and fresh.
It is from Ode: Intimations of Immortality. He completed it in 1804.
Recently a Sahaja Yogi from Bristol took us hiking near Tintern Abbey in Wales. As we looked at the view, he read to us from Wordworth's Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. We were actually a couple of miles downstream from the abbey, but almost everything mentioned in the poem, we could see in the vista spread out before us.