The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it.

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.

Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise