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.