trailing clouds of glory...

here's the wordsworth poem, "intimations of imortality from recollections of early childhood" that the blind mr. randolph knows by heart in the great gilly hopkins. mind you, it's 208 lines (7 pages in the oxford book of english verse: 1250-1900), but here's the beginning of my favorite stanza (line 59) quoted in TGGH:

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
from god, who is our home...