He had abstained from reading fiction, doubting whether it was profitable, since the early days when with a thrill of boyish excitement he read "Sinbad the Sailor" and Marryatt's novels.

After a while his views as to the utility of fiction changed.

He found that his mind was suffering from the solid food to which it was restricted, and he began to make incursions into the realm of poetry and fiction with excellent results.

He usually limited this kind of reading, and did not neglect for the fascination of romance those more solid works which should form the staple of a young man's reading.
It is well known that among poets Tennyson was his favorite, so that in after years, when at fifteen minutes' notice, on the first anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, he was called upon to move an adjournment of the House, as a mark of respect to the martyred President, he was able from memory to quote in his brief speech, as applicable to Lincoln, the poet's description of some "Divinely gifted man, Whose life in low estate began, And on a simple village green, Who breaks his birth's invidious bars, And grasped the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance, And grapples with his evil stars; Who makes by force his merit known, And lives to clutch the golden keys To mould a mighty state's decrees, And shape the whisper of the throne; And moving up from high to higher, Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope The pillar of a people's hope, The center of a world's desire." I am only repeating the remark made by many when I call attention to the fitness of this description to Garfield himself.
Our young student was fortunate in possessing a most retentive memory.
What he liked, especially in the works of his favorite poet, was so impressed upon his memory that he could recite extracts by the hour.
This will enable the reader to understand how thoroughly he studied, and how readily he mastered, those branches of knowledge to which his attention was drawn.

When in after years in Congress some great public question came up, which required hard study, it was the custom of his party friends to leave Garfield to study it, with the knowledge that in due time he would be ready with a luminous exposition which would supply to them the place of individual study.
Young Garfield was anxious to learn the language of Goethe and Schiller, and embraced the opportunity afforded at college to enter upon the study of German.