Oxford, where oxen forded the river

 "It is easy to forget," Lewis writes in
A Preface to Paradise Lost, "that the man who writes a good love sonnet needs not only to be enamoured of a woman, but also to be enamoured of the Sonnet." 

 In The Allegory of Love, Lewis observes
that his ideal day "would be to read the Italian epic - to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight
hours of each happy day." 

Our associations with the word "puritan" have to be almost entirely corrected, he writes; "Whatever else they were they were not sour, gloomy, or severe; nor did their enemies bring any such charge
against them." He goes on to argue that Puritan Christians of the sixteenth century
were accused of being "not too grim, but too glad to be true." 

Lewis made the case that every instant of history is significant to the whole and defined history as "a roaring cataract of billions upon billions of such moments: any one of them too complex to grasp in its entirety, and the aggregate beyond all imagination."