Boyhood is one of the happiest periods of life. “Ye little know,” said Robert Burns, “the ill ye court when manhood is your wish.” Taking a look backward Lord Byron cried, “Ah, happy years once more, who would not be a boy?” Thomas Moore says, in his beautiful poem: “Oft in the Stilly Night:”
“The smiles, the tears of boyhood’s years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone now dimmed and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
“Thus in the stilly night
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Sad mem’ry brings the light
Of other days around me.”
“There is no boy so poor,” said Phillips Brooks, “so ignorant, so outcast, that I do not stand in awe before him.” “I feel a profounder reverence for a boy than a man,” said President Garfield. “I never meet a ragged boy on the street without feeling that I owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his coat.” “Why, bless me! Is that the boy who did so gallantly in those two battles?” asked President Lincoln as a lad from the gunboat Ottawa was introduced to him. “Why, I feel as though I should take off my hat to him, and not he to me.”