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, 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?