Lowell's youth, called Sweet Auburn by the Harvard students, much
frequented by love-sick swains and strolling parties of youths and
maidens.

The Lowell residence was well into the country at that time. There were
few houses near it, and Boston could only be reached by a long detour in
a stage; so that an expedition to the city exhausted the better part of a
day. It was practically further in the country than Concord is at
present; and it was here that Lowell enjoyed that repose of mind which is
essential to vigorous mental development, and could find such interests
in external nature as the poet requires for the embellishment of his
verse.

He went to college at the age of fifteen, two years older than Edward
Everett, but sufficiently young to prove himself a precocious student.
Cambridge boys of good families have always been noted at Harvard for
their gentlemanly deportment. Besides this, Lowell had an immense fund of
wit and good spirits, and the two together served to make him very
popular--perhaps too much so for his immediate good. His father had
great hopes of his promising son,--that he would prove a fine scholar and
take a prominent part in the commencement exercises. He even offered the
boy a reward of two hundred dollars in case this should happen; but the
attractions of student and social life proved too strong for James. He
was quick at languages, but slow in mathematics, and as for Butler's
analogy he cannot be blamed for the aversion with which he regarded it.
He writes a letter in which he confesses to peeping over the professor's
shoulder to see what marks have been given for his recitations, so that
his father's exhortation would seem at one time to have been seriously
felt by him; but the effort did not last long, and we find him repeatedly
reprimanded for neglect of college duties.