A hushed two-line riddle about something higher than a house and higher than a tree. Short enough to say once and then let a small child guess the answer, which makes it a nice quiet moment before bed.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Higher than a house, higher than a tree.
Oh! whatever can that be?
About this rhyme
Traditional riddle rhyme with no recorded author; text checked against the chunk file and matches.
A short riddle, and the answer is a star. It works best said slowly, with a proper pause before "whatever can that be", so there's time to look up and think. It's an old rhyme with no named author, the kind that turns up in Mother Goose collections without any history attached to it at all.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition