"One summer hour abides, what time I perched,
Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves,
And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof
An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled,
Denouncing me an alien and a thief."

Quite like other boys Lowell was subjected to the processes of the
more formal education of books. He was first sent to a "dame school,"
and then to the private school of William Wells, 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