The explanation is rather ingenious than satisfying. Where did Shakespeare get his knowledge of the abundant life which his dramas present? He had the privilege of most people of remembering his own boyhood, and the mind which could invent Hamlet out of such stuff as experience and observation furnished could scarcely have missed acquaintance enough with children to enable him to portray them whenever the exigencies of his drama required. No, it is simpler to refer the absence of children as actors to the limitations of the stage, and to ascribe the infrequent references to childhood to the general neglect of the merely domestic side of life in Shakespeare’s art. Shakespeare’s world was an out-of-doors, public world, and his men, women, and lovers carried on their lives with no denser concealment than a wood or an arras could afford. The comprehensiveness of Shakespeare found some place for children; the lofty narrowness of Milton, none. The word _child_, even, can scarcely be found on a page of Milton’s verse. In his Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, with its Hymn, how slight is the mention of the child Jesus! How far removed is the treatment from that employed in the great procession of Madonnas! “Say, heavenly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein Afford a present to the Infant God?” The Infant God!—that is Milton’s attitude, more than half pagan. In L’Allegro and in Comus the lightness, which denotes the farthest swing of Milton’s fancy, is the relief which his poetic soul found from the high themes of theology, in Greek art. One is aware that Milton’s fine scholarship was the salvation of his poetry, as his Puritan sense of personality held in check a nature which else might have run riot in sportiveness and sensuousness. When he permitted himself his exquisite short flights of fancy, the material in which he worked was not the fresh spring of English nature, human or earthly, but the remote Arcadian virginity which he had learned of in his books. Not dancing children, but winged sprites, caught his poetic eye.