the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger.

How I pity those whose childhood has been unhappy! to them one of the sweetest springs of feeling has been utterly denied, the most green and beautiful part of life laid waste.

I do not think that any sorrow of youth or manhood equalled in intensity or duration the black and hopeless misery which followed the wrench of transference from a happy home to a school.

How fleeting the sorrows of youth, how slight the foundations on which the young build towers of despair

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers—
And that cannot stop their tears.

INFANT SORROW My mother groaned, my father wept: Into the dangerous world I leapt, Helpless, naked, piping loud, Like a fiend hid in a cloud. Struggling in my father's hands, Striving against my swaddling-bands, Bound and weary, I thought best To sulk upon my mother's breast.

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me - to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other.

Youth's first acquaintance with sorrow is a terrible thing—before time has taught, what it will surely teach, that grief is our natural portion, at once transitory and eternal. But the first lesson is the severest—we have not then looked among our fellows, and seen that suffering is general ; and we feel as if marked out by fate for misery that has no parallel.

We have had a glorious past—but a glorious past is bitterness for a child with a hopeless future.

There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.

Well I don’t know about you, but when I recall childhood pain, I don’t recall the pains of toothache, a thrashed backside, broken bones, stubbed toes, gashed knees or twisted ankles – I recall the pains of loneliness, boredom, abandonment, humiliation, rejection and fear. Those are the pains on which I might and, still sometimes do, dwell, and those pains, almost without exception, were inflicted on me by other children and by myself.

In ancient shadows and twilights
Where childhood had strayed,
The world’s great sorrows were born
And its heroes were made. In the lost boyhood of Judas
Christ was betrayed.

Mother:
Children and sorrow come together. First
Are sleepless nights, and cradle watchings — next
Your age is vexed with maiden fantasies,
And your girl's lover costeth you more care
Than ever did your own. It is not well !

Let me weep
My youth and its brave hopes, all dead and gone,
In tears which burn.