Poem IndexFirst lines About

Happy Thought

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) · A Child's Garden of Verses · 1885

The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Where this text comes from

First published in A Child's Garden of Verses (1885). First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1]

Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-20.

Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/robert-louis-stevenson_poetry, poetry.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (8)

https://archive.org/details/worksofrobertlvol28stev
https://archive.org/details/worksofrobertlou14stev
https://archive.org/details/newpoemsandvaria00stevuoft
https://archive.org/details/poemshithertounp00stevrich
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31291
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30659
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/441
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems,_by_Robert_Louis_Stevenson,_hitherto_unpublished

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L2.

Cite this poem

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). “Happy Thought.” First published in A Child's Garden of Verses (1885). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/robert-louis-stevenson/happy-thought/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

More by Robert Louis Stevenson