While at the law school, Sumner wrote a friend, "A lawyer must know everything. He must know law, history, philosophy, human nature; and, if he covets the fame of an advocate, he must drink of all the springs of literature, giving ease and elegance to the mind, and illustration to whatever subject it touches. So experience declares, and reflection bears experience out.... The lower floor of Divinity Hall, where I reside, is occupied by law students. There are here Browne and Dana of our old class, with others that I know nothing of,--not even my neighbor, parted from me by a partition wall, have I seen yet, and I do not wish to see him. I wish no acquaintances, for they eat up time like locusts. The old class-mates are enough." To another he wrote, "Determine that you will master the whole compass of law; and do not shrink from the crabbed page of black-letter, the multitudinous volumes of reports, or even the gigantic abridgments. Keep the high standard in your mind's eye, and you will certainly reach some desirable point.... You cannot read history too much, particularly that of England and the United States. History is the record of human conduct and experience; and it is to this that jurisprudence is applied.... Above all love and honor your profession. You can make yourself love the law, proverbially dry as it is, or any other study. Here is an opportunity for the exercise of the will. Determine that you will love it, and devote yourself to it as to a bride." When the study at the law school was over, Sumner returned to Boston, and entered the office of Benjamin Rand, Court Street, a man distinguished for learning rather than for oratory. The young lawyer succeeded fairly well, though he loved study better than general practice. Two years later he gave instruction at the law school when Judge Story was absent, and then reported his opinions in the Circuit Court, in three volumes. He assisted Professor Greenleaf in preparing "Reports of the Decisions of the Supreme Court of Maine," revised, with much labor, Dunlap's "Admiralty Practice," and edited "The American Jurist." In the midst of this hard work he spent a brief vacation at Washington, writing to his father, "I shall probably hear Calhoun, and he will be the last man I shall ever hear speak in Washington. I probably shall never come here again. I have little or no desire ever to come again in any capacity. Nothing that I have seen of politics has made me look upon them with any feeling other than loathing. The more I see of them the more I love law, which, I feel, will give me an honorable livelihood."