The Heart and Senses of Childhood

"I know well that only the rarest kind of best in anything can be good enough for the young. I know too that in later life it is just (if only just) possible now and again to recover fleetingly the intense delight, the untellable joy and happiness and fear and grief and pain of our early years, of an all but forgotten childhood. I have, in a flash, in a momentary glimpse, seen again a horse, an oak, a daisy, just as I saw them in those early years, as if with that heart, with those senses."

~ Walter de la Mare, in his introduction to Bells and Grass, his delightful collection of poems for children.