The Children

								

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 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,