“An age of mysteries! which he
Must live that would God's face see
Which angels guard, and with it play,
Angels! which foul men drive away.”
"Childhood".
Silex Scintillans (1655)
Context: Dear, harmless age! the short, swift span
Where weeping Virtue parts with man;
Where love without lust dwells, and bends
What way we please without self-ends. An age of mysteries! which he
Must live that would God's face see
Which angels guard, and with it play,
Angels! which foul men drive away.
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Henry Vaughan 23
Welsh author, physician and metaphysical poet 1621–1695Related quotes

“There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part.”

“Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!”
Source: Billy Budd, the Sailor (1891), Ch. 19

“And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile.”
The Pillar of the Cloud http://www.bartleby.com/236/75.html, st. 3 (1833).

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 14, end of (at page 131)

Sermon 9, as translated in The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church (1999) by Hughes Oliphant Old, Ch. 9: The German Mystics, p. 449
Context: The authorities teach that next to the first emanation, which is the Son coming out of the Father, the angels are most like God. And it may well be true, for the soul at its highest is formed like God, but an angel gives a closer idea of Him. That is all an angel is: an idea of God. For this reason the angel was sent to the soul, so that the soul might be re-formed by it, to be the divine idea by which it was first conceived. Knowledge comes through likeness. And so because the soul may know everything, it is never at rest until it comes to the original idea, in which all things are one. And there it comes to rest in God.

Sermon 9, as translated in The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church (1999) by Hughes Oliphant Old, Ch. 9: The German Mystics, p. 449