The Vision of Sir Launfal | Page 3

at the sides of the ample chimneys. The trees I look out on are
the earliest things I remember. There you have me in my new-old
quarters. But you must not fancy a large house--rooms sixteen feet
square, and on the ground floor, nine high. It was large, as things went
here, when it was built, and has a certain air of amplitude about it as
from some inward sense of dignity." In an earlier letter he wrote: "Here
I am in my garret. I slept here when I was a little curly-headed boy, and
used to see visions between me and the ceiling, and dream the so often
recurring dream of having the earth put into my hand like an orange. In
it I used to be shut up without a lamp,--my mother saying that none of
her children should be afraid of the dark,--to hide my head under the
pillow, and then not be able to shut out the shapeless monsters that
thronged around me, minted in my brain.... In winter my view is a wide
one, taking in a part of Boston. I can see one long curve of the Charles
and the wide fields between me and Cambridge, and the flat marshes
beyond the river, smooth and silent with glittering snow. As the spring
advances and one after another of our trees puts forth, the landscape is
cut off from me piece by piece, till, by the end of May, I am closeted in
a cool and rustling privacy of leaves." In two of his papers especially,
My Garden Acquaintance_ and A Good Word for Winter_, has Lowell
given glimpses of the out-door life in the midst of which he grew up.
II.
EDUCATION.
His acquaintance with books and his schooling began early. He learned
his letters at a dame school. Mr. William Wells, an Englishman, opened
a classical school in one of the spacious Tory Row houses near
Elmwood, and, bringing with him English public school thoroughness
and severity, gave the boy a drilling in Latin, which he must have made
almost a native speech to judge by the ease with which he handled it
afterward in mock heroics. Of course he went to Harvard College. He
lived at his father's house, more than a mile away from the college yard;
but this could have been no great privation to him, for he had the
freedom of his friends' rooms, and he loved the open air. The Rev.
Edward Everett Hale has given a sketch of their common life in college.

"He was a little older than I," he says, "and was one class in advance of
me. My older brother, with whom I lived in college, and he were most
intimate friends. He had no room within the college walls, and was a
great deal with us. The fashion of Cambridge was then literary. Now
the fashion of Cambridge runs to social problems, but then we were
interested in literature. We read Byron and Shelley and Keats, and we
began to read Tennyson and Browning. I first heard of Tennyson from
Lowell, who had borrowed from Mr. Emerson the little first volume of
Tennyson. We actually passed about Tennyson's poems in manuscript.
Carlyle's essays were being printed at the time, and his French
Revolution. In such a community--not two hundred and fifty students
all told,--literary effort was, as I say, the fashion, and literary men,
among whom Lowell was recognized from the very first, were special
favorites. Indeed, there was that in him which made him a favorite
everywhere."
Lowell was but fifteen years old when he entered college in the class
which graduated in 1838. He was a reader, as so many of his fellows
were, and the letters which he wrote shortly after leaving college show
how intent he had been on making acquaintance with the best things in
literature. He began also to scribble verse, and he wrote both poems
and essays for college magazines. His class chose him their poet for
Class Day, and he wrote his poem; but he was careless about
conforming to college regulations respecting attendance at morning
prayers; and for this was suspended from college the last term of his
last year, and not allowed to come back to read his poem. "I have heard
in later years," says Dr. Hale, "what I did not know then, that he rode
down from Concord in a canvas-covered wagon, and peeped out
through the chinks of the wagon to see the dancing around the tree. I
fancy he received one or two visits from his friends in the wagon; but
in those times it would have been treason to speak of this." He was sent
to Concord for his rustication, and so passed a few weeks of his youth