, under whose rigid
tuition he became thoroughly grounded in the classics. Among his
schoolfellows was W.W. Story, the poet-sculptor, who continued his
life-long friend. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was one of the
younger boys of the school, recalls the high talk of Story and Lowell
about the _Fairie Queen_. At fifteen he entered Harvard College, then
an institution with about two hundred students. The course of study
in those days was narrow and dull, a pretty steady diet of Greek,
Latin and Mathematics, with an occasional dessert of Paley's
_Evidences of Christianity_ or Butler's _Analogy_. Lowell was not
distinguished for scholarship, but he read omnivorously and wrote
copiously, often in smooth flowing verse, fashioned after the accepted
English models of the period. He was an editor of _Harvardiana_, the
college magazine, and was elected class poet in his senior year. But
his habit of lounging with the poets in the secluded alcoves of the
old library, in preference to attending recitations, finally became
too scandalous for official forbearance, and he was rusticated, "on
account of constant neglect of his college duties," as the faculty
records state. He was sent to Concord, where his exile was not without
mitigating profit, as he became acquainted with Emerson and Thoreau.
Here he wrote the class poem, which he was permitted to circulate in
print at his Commencement. This production, which now stands at the
head of the list of his published works, was curiously unprophetic of
his later tendencies. It was written in the neatly, polished couplets
of the Pope type and other imitative metres, and aimed to satirize the
radical movements of the period, especially the transcendentalists and
abolitionists, with both of whom he was soon to be in active sympathy.

Lowell's first two years out of college were troubled with rather more
than the usual doubts and questionings that attend a young man's
choice of a profession. He studied for a bachelor's degree in law,
which he obtained in two years. But the work was done reluctantly. Law
books, he says, "I am reading with as few wry faces as I may." Though
he was nominally practicing law for two years, there is no evidence
that he ever had a client, except the fictitious one so pleasantly
described in his first magazine article, entitled _My First Client_.
From Coke and Blackstone his mind would inevitably slip away to hold
more congenial communion with the poets. He became