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.
