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