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.

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.

I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry highwayman.

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.

There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs.

O daisy mine, what will it be to look / From God's side even of such a simple thing?

Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers, / Floats in the mist, a little cloud at tether.