His wife and three children[14] stayed behind. In fact--and it may as well be said here--they always stayed behind. It does not appear that throughout the twenty or more succeeding years, during which Shakespeare was mostly in London, that either wife or child was ever domiciled with him there for ever so little time. Indeed, for the nine years immediately following Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford, traces of his special whereabouts are very dim; we know that rising from humblest work in connection with companies of players, he was blazing a great and most noticeable path for himself; but whether through those nine years he was tied to the shadow of London houses, or was booked for up-country expeditions, or (as some reckon) made brief continental journeyings, we cannot surely tell. In 1596, however, on the occasion of his son Hamnet’s death, he appears in Stratford again, in the prime of his powers then, a well-to-do man (buying New Place the year following), his London fame very likely blazoning his path amid old towns-people--grieving over his lost boy, whom he can have seen but little--perhaps putting some of the color of his private sorrow upon the palette where he was then mingling the tints for his play of “Romeo and Juliet.” “Oh, my love, Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty. Thou art not conquered; Beauty’s ensign yet Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks, And death’s pale flag is not advanced there. Why art thou yet so fair?” His two daughters lived to maturity--both marrying; the favorite and elder daughter, Susanna, becoming the wife of Dr. Hall, a well-established physician in Stratford, who attended the poet in his last illness, and who became his executor. Shakespeare was--so far as known--watchful and tender of his children’s interest: nor is there positive evidence that he was otherwise to his wife, save such inferences as may be drawn from the tenor of some of his sonnets, and from those long London absences, over which it does not appear that either party greatly repined. Long absences are not _prima-facie_ evidence of a lack of domestic harmonies; do indeed often promote them in a limited degree; and at worst, may possibly show only a sagacious disposition to give pleasant noiselessness to bickerings that would be inevitable. It is further to be borne in mind, in partial vindication of Shakespeare’s marital loyalty, that this period of long exile from the family roof entailed not only absence from his wife, but also from father and mother--both of whom were living down to a date long subsequent,[15] and with whom--specially the mother--most affectionate relations are undoubted. A disloyalty that would have made him coy of wifely visitings could hardly harden him to filial duties, while the phlegmatic indifference of a very busy London man, which made him chary of home visitings, would go far to explain the seeming family estrangement.