Earliest

Famous quotes containing the word earliest:

    Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
    Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain,
    Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,
    And parting summer’s lingering blooms delayed,
    Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,
    Seats of my youth, when every sport could please,
    How often have I loitered o’er the green,
    Where humble happiness endeared each scene.
    Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774)

    At the earliest ending of winter,
    In March, a scrawny cry from outside
    Seemed like a sound in his mind.
    He knew that he heard it,
    A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
    In the early March wind.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole.... The characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood. The pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inheritance of other men. This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)