s admiration for the Wordsworth sonnets.
Many a time since the War he would recite the glorious sonnet which
proclaims that

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifest.

The magic of Keats and his adoration of beauty struck a responsive
chord in Paul's nature. Tennyson did not stir him to the depths of his
being like Wordsworth. "Ulysses," "The Revenge," and "Crossing the
Bar" were the only Tennyson poems that he cared for. In an essay
written when he was eighteen he defined poetry as "the soul of man put
into untrammelled speech, the voice of angels, the music of the
spheres." He read with critical discernment, sometimes agreeing,
sometimes disagreeing, with the author. It was his habit when reading
a book to mark passages that impressed him and make comments in the
margin. Some of his _obiter dicta_ shall be given. In judging them it
should be remembered that they were all pronounced before he was
nineteen.

How aptly said that Dante seems to have tried to write a poem
with a sculptor's chisel or a painter's brush.

Froissart observes clearly, but his observation is limited to the
world of nobles and chivalry; he ignores the life, the sufferings
and the joys of the people.

Ben Jonson, master of dignified declamatory drama, was the
greatest of the post-Shakespeare school. We may justly say
post-Shakespeare, though Jonson was nearly contemporaneous with
the Bard of Avon, because the influence of such a man clearly
belongs to an age in which the freedom and romantic magnificence
of Shakespeare have been forgotten.

Gibbon is the first of historians. The "Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire" runs its course like some majestic river.

Burns is a microcosm of Scotland.

Burke--a stainless and beautiful character. A theorist in
practice; a practical man in theory.

Burke's view of Rousseau was biased and unjust.

Though contemptuous of Wordsworth, Byron himself is a romantic of
the romanticists. He was the guiding star of rebels the world
over.

In the calm purity of his verse, Shelley is more classic than
romantic. What ecstatic melody in his lyrics!

Dickens is often mawkish and often portrays oddities; but these
oddities do exist, espe