The speaker meets a little girl on a walk and asks where she’s off to. Her answer brims with simple pleasure: she’s going to the green to play because the May flowers are out and the cowslips are ready to pick. She’s been given an hour to fill her basket, and as she pushes back her bonnet and smiles, you can feel how fully she’s wrapped up in that small, happy errand.
But her words — “got leave to spend an hour” — lodge in the speaker’s mind. After she skips away, he’s left with a sharp pang of recognition: childhood’s bliss is urgent and fleeting, and he’s no longer inside it. Watching her innocent delight makes him sigh with a mix of tenderness and longing. He confesses his own heart was once that happy, then adds that if nature would allow, he’d trade it for hers in a heartbeat. The encounter opens with a bright, spring-like ease, then turns quietly melancholy, as if the adult is standing outside a garden he can never re-enter.