CHAPTER II
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
1826-1838
The outer world came early to the notice of Lowell in his garden enclosure. “I remember,” he writes on the fourth of July, 1876, “how, fifty years ago to-day, I, perched in a great ox-heart cherry-tree, long ago turned to mould, saw my father come home with the news of John Adams’s death.” Two or three journeys also carried him out into the world in his early boyhood. He remembered going to Portsmouth in his seventh year, for the visit was impressed on his memory by the startling effect produced by a skeleton which he confronted when he opened a long red chest in Dr. Brackett’s house; and it was the next year that his father took him to Washington and carried him out to Alexandria, where he spent some days with the Carroll family, who were connections on his mother’s side, and whence he made an excursion to Mount Vernon. It all came back to him fifty-nine years later when he took his grandson to the same shrine; he went straight to the key of the Bastile and to the honey-locusts in the garden.
The rambles, too, to Beaver Brook and the Waverley Oaks, in the country within easy stroll of Elmwood, were extended when he climbed into the chaise with his father and drove off to neighboring parishes at such times as Dr. Lowell exchanged with his brother ministers. In those little journeys he had an opportunity to see the lingering reverence still paid to the minister, when boys doffed their hats and girls dropped a curtsy by the roadside as his father passed by. These exchanges drew Dr. Lowell and his little son as far as Portsmouth on the east and Northampton on the west. “I can conceive,” says Lowell, “of nothing more delightful than those slow summer journeys through leafy lanes and over the stony hills, where we always got out and walked. In that way I think I gained a more intimate relation with what we may call pristine New England than has fallen to the fortune of most men of my age.”[12] Thirty years after these experiences he could give this graphic report of the contests he was wont to witness in the village choir:—
“Sometimes two ancient men, through glasses dim,
In age’s treble deaconed off the hymn,
Paused o’er long words and then with breathless pace
Went down a slope of short ones at a race,
While who could sing and who could not, but would,
Rushed helter-skelter after as they could.
Well I remember how their faces shone,
Safe through some snare like Re-sig-na-ti-on,
And how some graceless youth would mock the tones
Of Deacon Jarvis or of Deacon Jones:
In towns ambitious of more cultured strains,
The gruff bass-viol told its inward pains
As some enthusiast, deaf to catgut’s woe,
Rasped its bare nerves with torture-rosined bow;
Hard-by another, with strained eyeballs set,
Blew devious discord through his clarinet,
And the one fiddle, that was wont to seek
In secular tunes its living all the week,
Blind to the leader’s oft-repeated glance
Mixed up the psalm-tune with a country dance.”[13]
More frequent journeys were those which he and his brothers and sisters invented for themselves by naming different parts of Elmwood after cities of the world and spending thus with their imagination the small geographical earnings of the schoolroom.
The first school which the boy attended was a dame school, which appears to have been somewhere not far from the river in the neighborhood of what is now Brattle Square. Once in verse and once in prose Lowell recorded his childish experience in and out of this primary school. In his introduction to “The Biglow Papers,” first series, is a fragment beginning—
“Propped on the marsh, a dwelling now, I see
The humble school-house of my A, B, C;”
and in his “New England Two Centuries Ago” there is a passage often read and quoted, which is a faithful picture of the author’s life within and without one of the “martello towers that protect our coast,” but he does not add the personal touch of his own return from school, whistling as he came in sight of his home as a signal to the mother watching for him. A bit of childish sport may be added from an omitted extract from the same fragmentary poem, since it brings to view two of Lowell’s boy companions:—
“Where Felton puns in English or in Greek,
And shakes with laughter till the timbers creak,
The ‘Idle Man’ once lived; the man I knew,
The author dwelt beyond my boyish view.
There once, the college butler aided, too,
My pony through his own front door he drew,
I on her back, and strove with winning airs
To coax my shaggy Shetlander upstairs;
Rejected hospitality! the more
He tugged in front, she backed toward the door.
Had oats been offered, she had climbed at least
Up to the garret, canny Scottish beast.
Across the way, where once an Indian stood
O’er Winthrop’s door, carved horribly in wood,
On the green duck-pond’s sea, where water fails
In droughty times, replenished then with pails,
Richard the Second from their moorings cast
His shingle fleets, and served before the mast,
While Ned and I consigned a well-culled store
Of choicest pebbles for the other shore.
Then walked at leisure to the antipodes,
Changing en route to Chinese consignees.”
Both Richard and Edmund Dana were his neighbors and friends, and with these early playmates should be named William Story. To him, as to one who had journeyed with him “through the green secluded valley of boyhood,” he addressed his “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago.” Story and the two Higginsons, Thatcher and Thomas Wentworth, were the only day scholars with Lowell at the boarding-school, kept by Mr. William Wells, to which Lowell was sent to be prepared for entrance to college. Mr. Wells was an Englishman, who brought with him to this country attainments in scholarship which were disclosed in the making of a simple Latin grammar and in an edition of Tacitus. He engaged in publishing under the firm name of Wells & Lilly, but meeting with reverses, he opened a classical school in the old Fayerweather house in Cambridge. He was a man of robust and masterful habit, who kept up the English tradition of the rattan in school and manly sport out of doors. The school had its gentler side in the person of Mrs. Wells, to whom Lowell sent a copy of “The Vision of Sir Launfal” in 1866, with the words: “Will you please me by accepting this little book in memory of your constant kindness to a naughty little cub of a schoolboy more than thirty years ago? I hope you will forget his ill deserts as faithfully as he remembers how much he owes you.”