I include this poem, although it is in the anthologies, because from my own experience a young reader will not see its beauty without some words of explanation. It is the precursor of the greatest ode ever written, Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Wordsworth, Vaughan, and many others believe that we had a separate existence before we came into this world (and there is much in the experience of each of us to warrant that belief). Wordsworth says:
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.
But in order to appreciate either Wordsworth’s or Vaughan’s poem it is not necessary to have this belief in a past separate existence—it is enough to realize that
Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
One may see the small value God has for riches by the people He gives them to.