“Her pretty feet, like snails, did creep
A little out, and then,
As if they playèd at bo-peep,
Did soon draw in again.”

— Robert Herrick, book Hesperides

"To Mistress Susanna Southwell". Compare: "Her feet beneath her petticoat / Like little mice stole in and out", Sir John Suckling, "Ballad upon a Wedding".
Hesperides (1648)

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Robert Herrick34

17th-century English poet and cleric 1591–1674

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“When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. V, ch. 2
The Return of the Native (1878)

“She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

“The snail will get to Easter just as soon.”

Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406) French poet

Aussi tost vient à Pasques limaçon.
"Moult se vantoit li cerfs d'estre legiers", line 10; text and translation from Brian Woledge (ed.) The Penguin Book of French Verse, 1: To the Fifteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1961] 1968) p. 238.

“Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out,
As if they feared the light;
But oh, she dances such a way!
No sun upon an Easter-day
Is half so fine a sight.”

John Suckling (1609–1642) English poet

Ballad upon a Wedding. Compare: "Her pretty feet, like snails, did creep A little out, and then, As if they played at bo-peep, Did soon draw in again", Robert Herrick, To Mistress Susanna Southwell.
Other poems