Eternal blessings crown my earliest friend,
And round his dwelling guardian saints attend. [ Goldsmith ]

Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds. [ Milton ]

Woman, last at the cross, and earliest at the grave. [ E. S. Barrett ]

In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the latter poetry has become science. [ Lowell ]

How can there be pride in a contrite heart? Humility is the earliest fruit of religion. [ Hosea Ballou ]

Probably the earliest flyswatters were nothing more than some sort of striking surface attached to the end of a long stick. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

Proverbs were anterior to books, and formed the wisdom of the vulgar, and in the earliest ages were the unwritten laws of morality. [ Disraeli ]

I have unlearned contempt; it is a sin that is engendered earliest in the soul, and doth beset it like a poison worm feeding on all its beauty. [ Willis ]

The importance of the romantic element does not rest upon conjecture. Pleasing testimonies abound. Hannah More traced her earliest impressions of virtue to works of fiction; and Adam Clarke gives a list of tales that won his boyish admiration. Books of entertainment led him to believe in a spiritual world; and he felt sure of having been a coward, but for romances. He declared that he had learned more of his duty to God, his neighbor and himself from Robinson Crusoe than from all the books, except the Bible, that were known to his youth. [ Willmott ]