“Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, in which he expressed the idea that children are born “trailing clouds of glory,” with the innocence, purity, and knowledge from having just come from God. It is the process of growing up, and the corrupting influence of society and life, that strips them of all their innate angelic goodness, what Wordsworth called their “hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.”
