Noticing that the poet/Shelley is retracing the path of his soul in lines 190-216, Leslie Brisman draws a comparison between Shelley and Wordsworth:
Like the myth of preexistence which Wordsworth revised as background for the experience of loss in his Intimations Ode, Shelley's history of the soul "in the clear golden prime of [his] youth's dawn" poses as a true spiritual beginning, a dream world elsewhere from whence the soul descends into nature. Though it is crucial to see the soul in line 217 making a new beginning when it springs forth from the dreamy background of the preceding verse paragraph, it is no less interesting to inquire what in the poem impels the appearance of the dream vision of preexistence. [...]. All the difference between Shelley and Wordsworth might be caught in the juxtaposition of the incident beginning "There was a Being" to Wordsworth's incident "There was a boy"[...]. Yet there remains something essentially Wordsworthian about presenting dreamy youth as though it were an incident, a single spot of time to be revisited. (115)
Brisman, Leslie. "Epipsychidion." Modern Critical Views: Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. 113-120.