O spring to light, auspicious babe, be born!”
we remember Milton’s Infant God. The two poets touch, with a like faintness, the childhood of Jesus, but the one through awe and grandeur of contemplation, the other through the polite indifference of a man of the world. Or take Pope’s mundane philosophy, as exhibited most elaborately in his Essay on Man, and set it beside Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man:—
“Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age:
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before;
Till tired he sleeps and life’s poor play is o’er.”