year they sang of was to be a particularly fine year, as who should say a
fine child and forward, with congruous syntax at two years old, and
ellipses, figures, and tropes. Even as late as Keats a poet would not
have patience with the process of the seasons, but boasted of untimely
flowers. The "musk-rose" is never in fact the child of mid-May, as he
has it.

The young women of Addison are nearly fourteen years old. His fear of
losing the idea of the bloom of their youth makes him so tamper with the
bloom of their childhood. The young heiress of seventeen in the
_Spectator_ has looked upon herself as marriageable "for the last six
years." The famous letter describing the figure, the dance, the wit, the
stockings of the charming Mr. Shapely is supposed to be written by a girl
of thirteen, "willing to settle in the world as soon as she can." She
adds, "I have a good portion which they cannot hinder me of." This
correspondent is one of "the women who seldom ask advice before they have
bought their wedding clothes." There was no sense of childhood in an age
that could think this an opportune pleasantry.

But impatience of the way and the wayfaring was to disappear from a later
century--an age that has found all things to be on a journey, and all
things complete in their day because it is their day, and has its
appointed end. It is the tardy conviction of this, rather than a
sentiment ready made, that has caused the childhood of children to seem,
at last, something else than a defect.




OUT OF TOWN