We could never have loved

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,—if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass; the same hips and haws on the autumn's hedgerows; the same redbreasts that we used to call “God's birds,” because they did no harm to the precious crops.

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Flowers

Published by the George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett, 2025. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Heelam, Monique