Wahre dir den Kindersinn,
Kindheit blüht in Liebe bin,
Kinderzeit ist heil'ge Zeit,
Heidenkindheit—Christenheit.
—B. Goltz.
Happy those early days, when I Shined in my angel infancy.
—Henry Vaughan.
Childhood shall be all divine.—B. W. Proctor.
But Heaven is kind, and therefore all possess,
Once in their life, fair Eden's simpleness.—H. Coleridge.
But to the couch where childhood lies,
A more delicious trance is given,
Lit up by rays from seraph eyes,
And glimpses of remembered heaven.—W. M. Praed.
O for boyhood's time of June,
Crowding years in one brief moon!—Whittier.
Golden Age.
The English word world, as the Anglo-Saxon weorold, Icelandic veröld, and Old High German weralt indicate, signified originally "age of man," or "course of man's life," and in the mind of the folk the life of the world and the life of man have run about the same course. By common consent the golden age of both was at the beginning, ab ovo. With Wordsworth, unlettered thousands have thought:—
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!"
Die Kindheit ist ein Augenblick Gottes, "childhood is a moment of God," said Achim Ton Arnim, and Hartley Coleridge expresses the same idea in other words:—