He really thought it a sinful waste of time to write poetry in school.

He had given me a subject for composition, a useful, practical one, but not at all to my taste, and I had ventured to disregard it.

I had jumped over the rock, and climbed up to the flowers that grew above it.

He was a thorough mathematician, a celebrated grammarian, a renowned geographer and linguist, but I then thought he had no more ear for poetry or music, no more eye for painting,--the painting of God, or man,--than the stalled ox, or the Greenland seal.

I did him injustice, and he was unjust to me.