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 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 questions at issue—an interesting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts.  This is a disposition, a general consent, to find the use and the value of process, and even to understand a kind of repose in the very wayfaring of progress.  With this is a resignation to change, and something more than resignation—a delight in those qualities that could not be but for their transitoriness.

What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the world, for childhood?  Time was when childhood was but borne with, and that for the sake of its mere promise of manhood.  We do not now hold, perhaps, that promise so high.  Even, nevertheless, if we held it high, we should acknowledge the approach to be a state adorned with its own conditions.

But it was not so once.  As the primitive lullaby is nothing but a patient prophecy (the mother’s), so was education, some two hundred years ago, nothing but an impatient prophecy (the father’s) of the full stature of body and mind.  The Indian woman sings of the future hunting.  If her song is not restless, it is because she has a sense of the results of time, and has submitted her heart to experience.  Childhood is a time of danger; “Would it were done.”  But, meanwhile, the right thing is to put it to sleep and guard its slumbers.  It will pass.  She sings prophecies to the child of his hunting, as she sings a song about the robe while she spins, and a song about bread as she grinds corn.  She bids good speed.

John Evelyn was equally eager, and not so submissive.  His child—“that pretty person” in Jeremy Taylor’s letter of condolence—was chiefly precious to him inasmuch as he was, too soon, a likeness of the man he never lived to be.  The father, writing with tears when the boy was dead, says of him: “At two and a half years of age he pronounced English, Latin, and French exactly, and could perfectly read in these three languages.”  As he lived precisely five years, all he did was done at that little age, and it comprised this: “He got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius’s ‘Janua,’ and had a strong passion for Greek.”

Grant that this may be a little abated, because a very serious man is not to be too much believed when he is describing what he admires; it is the very fact of his admiration that is so curious a sign of those hasty times.  All being favorable, the child of