Mr. Lowell entered Harvard College in his sixteenth year, and, though never what was called a brilliant student, was graduated in due time, and entered upon the study of law. He passed through the usual course and took his degree of LL. B., but he was not noted for his love of study in the law school, more than in college. He was noted for his love of reading in both places, but it was of books outside the established course. His literary bent was strongly marked from the first, and his poetic talent developed itself at an early day. When only twenty-two years of age he published his first volume of poems, much like the youthful poems of other bards, and far inferior to the work of Bryant at the same age. Three years later he put forth a volume of verses much more worthy of his genius, some of them being favorites still,--like the "Shepherd of King Admetus," "The Forlorn," "The Heritage," which achieved the immortality of the school-books, and a few others. There was not a large sale for books of poetry in this country at that time, and these first ventures of Lowell fared much like other books of that day. If he was not quite as badly off as poor Thoreau, who, a year after his first thousand was printed, wrote to a friend that he was now the owner of a library of about a thousand volumes, over nine hundred of which he wrote himself, he certainly was not far ahead of that original writer in the matter of sales. His books, however, attracted some attention, and could hardly be classed under the head he proposes for certain books, in the "Fable for Critics," namely, "literature suited to desolate islands,"-- "Such as Satan, if printing had then been invented, As the climax of woe would to Job have presented." Mr. Lowell was married in 1844 to Miss Maria White, of Watertown near Cambridge, the lady to whom some of his first poems were addressed, and who was herself a writer of very sweet and tender verse. Mrs. Lowell was most beautiful and accomplished, a fit wife for a poet, and the maker of a restful but inspiring home. Beautiful children came to them to gladden their lives for a little season; but all except one were recalled in early infancy, and the grief of the parents was both acute and lasting. Many a time, as he tells us, he-- "looked at the snow-fall, And thought of the leaden sky That arched o'er our first great sorrow When that mound was heaped so high." And only in after-years he-- "Remembered the gradual patience That fell from that cloud like snow, Flake by flake, healing and hiding The scar of our deep-plunged woe."