The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.
Christopher Morley, To a Child
The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses,
commanded by every sight and sound, without any power
to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle
or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog,
individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with
every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue,
which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred.
But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic.
She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical
growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes
and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not
be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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