Saturday, December 3, 2011

Fairy Land


Francis Thompson (1859–1907)

Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day.


 It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space; it is


        To see a world in a grain of sand,
        And a Heaven in a wild flower,
        Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
        And eternity in an hour;
it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor petition that it be commuted into death.

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