m sight by some miraculous
power had been restored in a moment." Paul and I often exchanged ideas
on Shakespeare. He was lost in wonder at Shakespeare's creative power,
his inexhaustible fertility, the universality of his range, the
perfection of his portraiture, his mastery over all moods, his cunning
artistry in the use of words, his exuberant imagery and effortless
ease. He made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon to see with his own
eyes the spots and scenes amid which Shakespeare's youth and declining
years were spent. The smiling beauty of Stratford and the rich rural
charm of its surroundings left on his mind a delightful impression
that was never erased.

Next to Shakespeare his admiration flowed out to Milton. When he went
into the battle-line he took with him only two books--his Shakespeare
and his Milton. With Milton's character he had some marked
affinities--the virginal purity of Milton's youth, his love of
learning, his hatred of all tyrannies, secular and spiritual, making a
strong appeal to the sympathies of my son. "Milton," he wrote, "is
perhaps the very grandest figure in English history." "In Milton the
spirit of Puritanism is combined with a purely Hellenic love of
beauty." "'Paradise Lost' may be regarded (1) as a reflection of the
Puritan point of view; (2) as a poem pure and simple; (3) as an epic
of the classical school."

Profound as was his admiration for "Paradise Lost," he could not
forbear smiling at Taine's quip that the Miltonic Adam is "your true
Paterfamilias, a member of the Opposition, a Whig, a Puritan, who
entered Paradise via England."

Paul extolled Pope's ingenuity and metrical felicity--he has
thoroughly annotated the "Essay on Man"--but was acutely conscious of
aridity and the absence of rapture and vision in Pope as in Dryden. He
singled out as "the finest passage in the 'Essay on Man'" the eight
lines in which Pope contrasts the majesty of the Universe with the
insignificance of man, beginning:

Let earth unbalanced from her orbit fly,
Planets and suns run lawless through the sky.

He had not much respect for Pope's philosophy, and, commenting on one
passage in the same poem, writes: "Pope, like many other unsound
reasoners, when his position becomes dangerous, seeks to vindicate
himself by insults."

Above all nineteenth-century poets he loved Wordsworth, the revelation
of whose richness and glory only came to him after he was seventeen.
There were no bounds to hi