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.