(An explanation for the thread's title is to be found in the last paragraph of the post.)
Frances Ridley Havergal:
"I had a far more vivid sense of the beauty of Nature as a little child than I have even now. I have hardly felt anything so intensely since, in the way of a sort of unbearable enjoyment. The golden quiet of a bright summer's day used to enter into me and do me good. What only some great and rare musical enjoyment is to me now, the shade of a tree under a clear blue sky, with a sunbeam glancing through the boughs, was to me then. But I did not feel happy in my very enjoyment; I wanted more. I do not think I was eight when I hit upon Cowper's lines, ending:
'My Father made them all!'
That was what I wanted to be able to say; and, after once seeing the words, I never saw a lovely scene again without being teased by them.
"One spring (I think 1845) I kept thinking of them, and a dozen times a day said to myself, 'Oh, if God would but make me a Christian before the summer comes,' because I longed so to enjoy His works as I felt they could be enjoyed.
"All this while I don't think any one could have given the remotest guess of what was passing in my mind. I knew I was a 'naughty child'; in fact, I almost enjoyed my naughtiness in a savage, desperate kind of way, despairing of getting better, except by being made a Christian."
From the biography of Frances Ridley Havergal
by Lizzie Alldridge...
"In her latest little book, "Kept for the Master's Use," published after her death, she tells us how, at this time, she longed for some one (who did not belong to her own family to whom she would not listen, good and holy though she knew them to be) to tell her about Christ. She says good men used to come and preach beautiful sermons in her father's church, but when they went home with them they talked of all sorts of other things, "and I did so wish they would talk about the Saviour whom I wanted, but had not found. It would have been so much more interesting to me, and oh! why didn't they ever talk to me about Him, instead of about my lessons or their little girls at home? They did not know how a hungry little soul went empty away."