"The Selfish Giant"
The Selfish Giant owns a beautiful garden which has 12 peach trees and lovely fragrant flowers, in which children love to play. On the giant's return from seven years visiting his friend the Cornish Ogre, he takes offense at the children, and builds a wall to keep them out. The garden falls into perpetual winter. One day, the giant is awakened by a linnet, and discovers that spring has returned to the garden, as the children have found a way in through a gap in the wall. He sees the error of his ways, and resolves to destroy the wall. However, when he emerges from his castle, all the children run away, except for one boy, who was trying to climb a tree. The giant helps this boy into the tree; the boy kisses him in return. The giant announces: "It is your garden now, little children," and knocks down the wall; the children once more play in the garden, and spring returns. But the boy that the Giant helped does not return, and the Giant is heartbroken. Many years later, after happily playing with the children all the time, the Giant is old and feeble. One winter morning, he awakes to see the trees in one part of his garden in full blossom. He descends from the castle, to discover the boy that he once helped lying beneath a beautiful white tree that the Giant has never seen before. The Giant sees that the boy bears the stigmata. He does not realize that the boy is actually the Christ Child, and is furious that somebody has wounded him.
| “ | "Who hath dared to wound thee?" cried the Giant; "tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him." "Nay!" answered the child; "but these are the wounds of Love." "Who art thou?" said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child. And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, "You let Me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with Me to My garden, which is Paradise." |
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Shortly afterwards the happy giant dies; that same afternoon his body is found lying under the tree, covered in blossoms.
Read more about this topic: The Happy Prince And Other Tales
Famous quotes containing the words selfish and/or giant:
“Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation blithely to declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)