Yet, as Lowell himself reminds us, the Cambridge of his boyhood, besides possessing the common characteristics of New England towns, had its special flavor from the presence there of the oldest college of New England. Like the Cambridge boys of to-day, he hovered about the skirts of Alma Mater, took in, year by year, the entertainment offered by the college at its annual Commencement festival,--a greater raree-show then than now,--and made the acquaintance of the queer misshapen minds that by some occult law of nature always seem to be found in the shade of a college town, as if the “Muses’ factories” must necessarily have their refuse heaps not far away. A boy who grows up in a college town, especially when the community and the town are somewhat isolated, hardly knows the wonder and gravity which assail one who comes up to college from a distant home. In Lowell’s youth Harvard College and Cambridge town were singularly isolated in spite of their geographical nearness to Boston. Once an hour a long omnibus, and twice an hour a short one, jogged back and forth between the village and the city, picking up passengers in a leisurely fashion, and going longer or shorter distances from the college yard, according to the importunity of the passenger or the good-nature of the driver. An hourly stage to the city meant much deliberation in making the journey, and Cambridge was by no means the bedchamber for city merchants and professional men which it has since become. When Lowell entered Harvard from Mr. Wells’s school in 1834, the college was surrounded by houses and gardens which marked almost the bounds of the town as one went toward Boston. The college itself was within a straggling enclosure still known by the homely name of the Yard, and occupied seven buildings therein; the library was in Harvard Hall, for Gore Hall was not begun till just as Lowell was graduating. The chapel was a dignified apartment of University Hall, designed by the architect Charles Bulfinch, who left his mark in Boston and its neighborhood upon buildings which stand in serene reproof of much later architecture. In the chapel also were held the academic functions, one of which, Exhibition Day, was observed three times a year; on two of these occasions the Governor of the Commonwealth attended, and on all of them the President of the college in his academic dress, the Fellows, the Overseers, and the Faculty marched to the chapel with ceremony, there to listen, along with an indulgent crowd of parents and friends, to the youthful speakers, who discoursed in Latin or in English, but were always introduced in Latin.