Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable.

Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn, Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers, And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers; A poet's face asleep in this grey morn. Now in the midst of the old world forlorn A mystic child is set in these still hours. I keep this time, even before the flowers, Sacred to all the young and the unborn.

Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk.

There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much confidence ...

for man, woman, and child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing. ... nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked foot.

A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back -- it is already so far.