Happy those early days, when I
Shin’d in my angel-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race.

These lines are from Henry Vaughan’s devotional lyric “The Retreat,” written in the mid-17th century and published in his collection *Silex Scintillans* during the English Civil War/Interregnum period. Vaughan (1621–1695), a Welsh poet associated with the Anglican “metaphysical” tradition, turned increasingly toward religious poetry after personal and national upheaval. In “The Retreat,” he looks back on childhood as a time of spiritual nearness to God—an “angel-infancy”—before worldly experience and sin obscure that original clarity. The poem participates in a Christian-Platonic idea of the soul’s origin in God and its longing to return.

Vaughan idealizes early childhood as a state of luminous innocence in which the soul still “shines” with traces of its divine origin. The “place / Appointed for my second race” frames earthly life as a second stage of existence: the soul’s descent into the world, where it must run a new “race” marked by trial, temptation, and forgetfulness. The speaker’s nostalgia is not merely sentimental; it is theological, expressing a desire to recover lost spiritual perception and to “return” toward God. The passage thus sets up the poem’s central movement from fallen adulthood back toward contemplative remembrance and redemption.