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 gl