The Children | Page 6

to bring a cup of tea to the writing- table of her mother, who had
often feigned indignation at the weakness of what her Irish maid always
called "the infusion." "I'm afraid it's bosh again, mother," said the child;
and then, in a half-whisper, "Is bosh right, or wash, mother?" She was
not told, and decided for herself, with doubts, for bosh. The afternoon
cup left the kitchen an infusion, and reached the library "bosh"
thenceforward.

CHILDREN IN MIDWINTER

Children are so flowerlike that it is always a little fresh surprise to see
them blooming in winter. Their tenderness, their down, their colour,
their fulness--which is like that of a thick rose or of a tight grape--look
out of season. Children in the withering wind are like the soft
golden-pink roses that fill the barrows in Oxford Street, breathing a
southern calm on the north wind. The child has something better than
warmth in the cold, something more subtly out of place and more
delicately contrary; and that is coolness. To be cool in the cold is the
sign of a vitality quite exquisitely alien from the common conditions of
the world. It is to have a naturally, and not an artificially, different and
separate climate.
We can all be more or less warm--with fur, with skating, with tea, with
fire, and with sleep--in the winter. But the child is fresh in the wind,
and wakes cool from his dreams, dewy when there is hoar- frost
everywhere else; he is "more lovely and more temperate" than the
summer day and than the winter day alike. He overcomes both heat and
cold by another climate, which is the climate of life; but that victory of
life is more delicate and more surprising in the tyranny of January. By
the sight and the touch of children, we are, as it were, indulged with
something finer than a fruit or a flower in untimely bloom. The childish
bloom is always untimely. The fruit and flower will be common later
on; the strawberries will be a matter of course anon, and the asparagus
dull in its day. But a child is a perpetual primeur.
Or rather he is not in truth always untimely. Some few days in the year
are his own season--unnoticed days of March or April, soft, fresh and
equal, when the child sleeps and rises with the sun. Then he looks as
though he had his brief season, and ceases for a while to seem strange.
It is no wonder that we should try to attribute the times of the year to
children; their likeness is so rife among annuals. For man and woman
we are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so
obviously their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition,
without renewel, without refrain. But it is by an intelligible illusion that
we look for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young

children--for a waxing that shall come again another time, and for a
waning that shall not be final, shall not be fatal. But every winter shows
us how human they are, and how they are little pilgrims and visitants
among the things that look like their kin. For every winter shows them
free from the east wind; more perfectly than their elders, they enclose
the climate of life. And, moreover, with them the climate of life is the
climate of the spring of life; the climate of a human March that is sure
to make a constant progress, and of a human April that never hesitates.
The child "breathes April and May"--an inner April and his own May.
The winter child looks so much the more beautiful for the season as his
most brilliant uncles and aunts look less well. He is tender and gay in
the east wind. Now more than ever must the lover beware of making a
comparison between the beauty of the admired woman and the beauty
of a child. He is indeed too wary ever to make it. So is the poet. As
comparisons are necessary to him, he will pay a frankly impossible
homage, and compare a woman's face to something too fine, to
something it never could emulate. The Elizabethan lyrist is safe among
lilies and cherries, roses, pearls, and snow. He undertakes the beautiful
office of flattery, and flatters with courage. There is no hidden reproach
in the praise. Pearls and snow suffer, in a sham fight, a mimic defeat
that does them no harm, and no harm comes to the lady's beauty from a
competition so impossible. She never wore a lily or a coral in the
colours of her face, and their beauty is not hers. But here is the secret:
she is compared with a flower because she could