Is mightier its billows to rouse or to calm.
"What form, or what pathway of death him affrighted
Who faced with dry eyes monsters swimming the deep,
Who gazed without fear on the storm-swollen billows,
And the lightning-scarred rocks, grim with death on the shore?"
In reviewing the work of the year 1874, he writes: "So far as individual work is concerned, I have done something to keep alive my tastes and habits. For example, since I left you I have made a somewhat thorough study of Goethe and his epoch, and have sought to build up in my mind a picture of the state of literature and art in Europe, at the period when Goethe began to work, and the state when he died. I have grouped the various poets into order, so as to preserve memoirs of the impression made upon my mind by the whole. The sketch covers nearly sixty pages of manuscript. I think some work of this kind, outside the track of one's every-day work, is necessary to keep up real growth."
In July, 1875, he gives a list of works that he had read recently. Among these are several plays of Shakespeare, seven volumes of Froude's England, and a portion of Green's "History of the English People." He did not limit himself to English studies, but entered the realms of French and German literature, having made himself acquainted with both these languages. He made large and constant use of the Library of Congress. Probably none of his political associates made as much, with the exception of Charles Sumner.
Major Bundy gives some interesting details as to his method of work, which I quote: "In all his official, professional, and literary work, Garfield has pursued a system that has enabled him to accumulate, on a vast range and variety of subjects, an amount of easily available information such as no one else has shown the possession of by its use. His house at Washington is a workshop, in which the tools are always kept within immediate reach. Although books overrun his house from top to bottom, his library contains the working material on which he mainly depends. And the amount of material is enormous. Large numbers of scrap-books that have been accumulating for over twenty years, in number and in value—made up with an eye to what either is, or may become, useful, which would render the collection of priceless value to the library of any first-class newspaper establishment—are so perfectly arranged and indexed, that their owner with his all-retentive memory, can turn in a moment to the facts that may be needed for almost any conceivable emergency in debate.
"These are supplemented by diaries that preserve Garfield's multifarous political, scientific, literary, and religious inquiries, studies, and readings. And, to make the machinery of rapid work complete, he has a large box containing sixty-three different drawers, each properly labeled, in which he places newspaper cuttings, documents, and slips of paper, and from which he can pull out what he wants as easily as an organist can play on the stops of his instrument. In other words, the hardest and most masterful worker in Congress has had the largest and most scientifically arranged of workshops."
It was a pleasant house, this, which Garfield had made for himself in Washington. With a devoted wife, who sympathized with him in his literary tastes, and aided him in his preparation for his literary work, with five children (two boys now at Williams College, one daughter, and two younger sons), all bright and promising, with a happy and joyous temperament that drew around him warmly-attached friends, with a mind continually broadening and expanding in every direction, respected and appreciated by his countrymen, and loved even by his political opponents, Garfield's lot seemed and was a rarely happy one. He worked hard, but he had always enjoyed work. Higher honors seemed hovering in the air, but he did not make himself anxious about them. He enjoyed life, and did his duty as he went along, ready to undertake new responsibilities whenever they came, but by no means impatient for higher honors.