In lines 5-8 of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall”, the narrator predicts that the child’s heart will grow colder and she will be less easily moved and less prone to tears about such things as the dying of the leaves in the autumn. He suggests that even if entire groves of trees shed all their leaves, an adult would not cry over it. On the other hand, this does not mean that adult life is happier than children’s lives for adults too mourn mortality, albeit the  mortality of people (themselves included) rather than leaves.