“Invest that ready money of yours! So far as I can see, it will have grown into a pretty fortune long before another book of my verse has crawled out of the inkpot. For which, on the whole, I am rather sorry—though, you see, even you will be the gainer.”

Wry admission of the slow pace of verse-writing, with a humorous nod to the publisher’s profit · Letter to a publisher, 1906 (quoted in the 1927 Poems foreword)

• Humour
• Poetry
• Writing

“I never could understand why men should be so insanely set on their first-born being a boy. This of ours, I am glad to say, is a girl. I should have been pleased either way, but as a matter of fact I wanted a girl. I don’t know why, but somehow with a girl one feels that one has provided against the disillusionment, the discomfort, the homelessness of old age and of mental and physical decrepitude.”

Affectionate preference for a daughter as a safeguard against the loneliness of later life · Letter (published in The Invisible Playmate, 1894)

• Age
• Children
• Family

“The unfolding of the fresh unsullied bud of a child’s mind is one of the redeeming graces of our time-worn old world. Seen through those trailing clouds of glory which enwrap the opening soul the familiar common-places of life and nature are transformed into wonderful bewitching mysteries.”

On the redemptive power of a child’s fresh vision of ordinary things · Digression on the Small People, Children’s Sayings (1900)

• Childhood
• Perception
• Wonder