The Children | Page 7

not endure to be
compared with a child. That would touch her too nearly. There would
be the human texture and the life like hers, but immeasurably more
lovely. No colour, no surface, no eyes of woman have ever been
comparable with the colour, the surface, and the eyes of childhood.
And no poet has ever run the risk of such a defeat. Why, it is defeat
enough for a woman to have her face, however well-favoured, close to
a child's, even if there is no one by who should be rash enough to
approach them still nearer by a comparison.
This, needless to say, is true of no other kind of beauty than that beauty
of light, colour, and surface to which the Elizabethans referred, and
which suggested their flatteries in disfavour of the lily. There are,

indeed, other adult beauties, but those are such as make no allusions to
the garden. What is here affirmed is that the beautiful woman who is
widely and wisely likened to the flowers, which are inaccessibly more
beautiful, must not, for her own sake, be likened to the always
accessible child.
Besides light and colour, children have a beauty of finish which is
much beyond that of more finished years. This gratuitous addition, this
completeness, is one of their unexpected advantages. Their beauty of
finish is the peculiarity of their first childhood, and loses, as years are
added, that little extra character and that surprise of perfection. A
bloom disappears, for instance. In some little children the whole face,
and especially all the space between the growth of the eyebrows and
the growth of the hair, is covered with hardly perceptible down as soft
as bloom. Look then at the eyebrows themselves. Their line is as
definite as in later life, but there is in the child the flush given by the
exceeding fineness of the delicate hairs. Moreover, what becomes,
afterwards, of the length and the curl of the eyelash? What is there in
growing up that is destructive of a finish so charming as this?
Queen Elizabeth forbade any light to visit her face "from the right or
from the left" when her portrait was a-painting. She was an observant
woman, and liked to be lighted from the front. It is a light from the
right or from the left that marks an elderly face with minute shadows.
And you must place a child in such a light, in order to see the finishing
and parting caress that infancy has given to his face. The down will
then be found even on the thinnest and clearest skin of the middle red
of his cheek. His hair, too, is imponderably fine, and his nails are not
much harder than petals.
To return to the child in January. It is his month for the laying up of
dreams. No one can tell whether it is so with all children, or even with
a majority; but with some children, of passionate fancy, there occurs
now and then a children's dance, or a party of any kind, which has a
charm and glory mingled with uncertain dreams. Never forgotten, and
yet never certainly remembered as a fact of this life, is such an evening.
When many and many a later pleasure, about the reality of which there

never was any kind of doubt, has been long forgotten, that evening--as
to which all is doubt--is impossible to forget. In a few years it has
become so remote that the history of Greece derives antiquity from it.
In later years it is still doubtful, still a legend.
The child never asked how much was fact. It was always so
immeasurably long ago that the sweet party happened--if indeed it
happened. It had so long taken its place in that past wherein lurks all
the antiquity of the world. No one would know, no one could tell him,
precisely what occurred. And who can know whether--if it be indeed a
dream--he has dreamt it often, or has dreamt once that he had dreamt it
often? That dubious night is entangled in repeated visions during the
lonely life a child lives in sleep; it is intricate with illusions. It becomes
the most mysterious and the least worldly of all memories, a spiritual
past. The word pleasure is too trivial for such a remembrance. A
midwinter long gone by contained the suggestion of such dreams; and
the midwinter of this year must doubtless be preparing for the heart of
many an ardent young child a like legend and a like antiquity. For the
old it is a mere present.

THAT PRETTY PERSON

During the many years in which "evolution" was the favourite word,
one significant lesson--so it seems--was learnt, which has outlived
controversy, and has remained longer than the