LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,107)
  • Text Authors (19,481)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,114)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894)

Children, you are very little
Language: English 
Children, you are very little,
And your bones are very brittle;
If you would grow great and stately,
You must try to walk sedately.
  
You must still be bright and quiet,
And content with simple diet;
And remain, through all bewild'ring,
Innocent and honest children.
  
Happy hearts and happy faces,
Happy play in grassy places --
That was how, in ancient ages,
Children grew to kings and sages.
  
But the unkind and the unruly,
And the sort who eat unduly,
They must never hope for glory --
Theirs is quite a different story!
  
Cruel children, crying babies,
All grow up as geese and gabies,
Hated, as their age increases,
By their nephews and their nieces.

About the headline (FAQ)

Text Authorship:

  • by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894), "Good and bad children", appears in A Child's Garden of Verses, first published 1885 [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by Joseph Eidson , "Good and bad children", 2010 [ mezzo-soprano and piano ], from Songs of Enchantment and Wonder, no. 1 [sung text checked 1 time]
  • by Liza Lehmann (1862 - 1918), "A moral", published 1902 [ voice or vocal quartet and piano ], from More daisies: new songs of childhood, no. 2 [sung text not yet checked]
  • by (Gerald) Graham Peel (1878 - 1937), "Good and bad children" [sung text not yet checked]

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

This text was added to the website: 2009-01-12
Line count: 20
Word count: 113

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2025 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris