If we may trust the confession in “The Cathedral” as personal and not dramatic, Lowell was singularly sensitive in childhood to those subtle stirrings of nature which give eternity to single moments, and create impressions which are indelible but never repeated. “The fleeting relish at sensation’s brim Had in it the best ferment of the wine.” A spring morning which witnessed the sudden miracle of regeneration; an hour of summer, when he sat dappled with sunshine, in a cherry-tree; a day in autumn, when the falling leaves moved as an accompaniment to his thought; the creaking of the snow beneath his feet, when the familiar world was transformed as in a vision to a polar solitude:-- “Instant the candid chambers of my brain Were painted with these sovran images; And later visions seem but copies pale From those unfading frescos of the past, Which I, young savage, in my age of flint, Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me Parted from Nature by the joy in her That doubtfully revealed me to myself.” CHAPTER II SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 1826-1838 The outer world came early to the notice of Lowell in his garden enclosure. “I remember,” he writes on the fourth of July, 1876, “how, fifty years ago to-day, I, perched in a great ox-heart cherry-tree, long ago turned to mould, saw my father come home with the news of John Adams’s death.” Two or three journeys also carried him out into the world in his early boyhood. He remembered going to Portsmouth in his seventh year, for the visit was impressed on his memory by the startling effect produced by a skeleton which he confronted when he opened a long red chest in Dr. Brackett’s house; and it was the next year that his father took him to Washington and carried him out to Alexandria, where he spent some days with the Carroll family, who were connections on his mother’s side, and whence he made an excursion to Mount Vernon. It all came back to him fifty-nine years later when he took his grandson to the same shrine; he went straight to the key of the Bastile and to the honey-locusts in the garden.