The poets had been the delight of his youth. He read them in the intervals of retirement at Quincy with a youthful enthusiasm, and tears and laughter came by turns, as their sad and bright visions passed before him. Pope was a favorite, "and the intonations of his voice in repeating the 'Messiah,'" says an inmate of the family, "will never cease to vibrate on the ear of memory." He was a deeply religious man, and though not taking the most unprejudiced views of divinity, what he received as spiritual truths were to him most evident and momentous realities, and he derived from them a purifying and invigorating power. "The dying Christian's Address to his Soul" was replete with pathos and beauty for him. He is remembered to have repeated it one evening with an intense expression of religious faith and joy; adding the Latin lines of Adrian, which Pope imitated. He was thought by some to have a tendency to Calvinistic theology, and to regard Unitarianism as too abstract and frigid. Thus he used sometimes to talk, but it was supposed to be for the purpose of putting Unitarians upon a defence of their faith, rather than with a serious design to impair it. On one occasion he conversed on the subject of popular applause and admiration. Its caprice, said he, is equalled only by its worthlessness, and the misery of that being who lives on its breath. There is one stanza of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, that is worth whole volumes of modern poetry; though it is the fashion to speak contemptuously of Thomson. He then repeated with startling force of manner and energy of enunciation, the third stanza, second canto, of that poem. "I care not, fortune, what you me deny; You cannot rob me of free nature's grace, You cannot shut the windows of the sky, Through which Aurora shows her brightening face; You cannot bar my constant feet to trace The woods and lawns by living streams at eve: Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace, And I their toys to the great children leave; Of Fancy, Reason, Virtue, nought can me bereave." He did not much admire the poetry of Byron. One objection which he is recollected to have made to the poet was the use of the word "rot." There is some peculiarity in Byron in this respect; thus in Childe Harold:-- "The Bucentaur lies _rotting_ unrestored, Where meaner relics must not dare to _rot_."