James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol. 1/2Scudder, Horace Elisha
General
James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol. 1/2
Scudder, Horace Elisha
Authors, American -- 19th century -- Biography; Diplomats -- United States -- Biography; Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891
The change from school to college, as I have intimated, was not such as
to strike very deeply into the boy’s consciousness. He continued for a
while to live at his father’s house, a mile away from the Yard, though
he had a room of his own nearer, at Mr. Hancock’s in Church Street, and
in the latter part of his course lived there altogether. Going to
college, thus, was very much like going to school as he had always done.
The college methods were not markedly different from those of a
preparatory school. There were lessons to learn and recite; the
text-book was the rule, and the fixed curriculum suggested no break from
the ordinary course of formal instruction. Except in the senior year,
there was a steady attention to Greek, Latin, and mathematics. In the
first year Tytler’s History was studied; in the second year English
grammar and modern languages were added; in the third year, besides
Greek and Latin and modern languages, Paley’s Evidences, Butler’s
Analogy, and chemistry appeared on the list, and themes and forensics
were introduced. In the senior year the ancient languages were dropped,
and natural philosophy, intellectual philosophy, astronomy, and
political economy took their place, with lectures on rhetoric,
criticism, theology, Story on the Constitution of the United States,
mineralogy, and anatomy--a somewhat confused jumble on paper in the
catalogue of the time, which it is to be hoped was reduced to some sort
of order, though it looks as if the senior were suddenly released from
too monotonous a course and bidden take a rapid survey of a wide range
of intellectual pursuits.
In his school days Lowell had been under the close surveillance given to
boys, and the partial freedom of college life brought with it a little
more sense of personal rights, but throughout the four years he was
boyish, frolicsome, very immature in expression, and disposed, in a
fitful fashion, to assert an independence of authority. He won a “detur”
in his sophomore year, and in a public exhibition in the first term of
his senior year he took part in a conference bearing the labored title:
“Ancient Epics, considered as Pictures of Manners, as Proofs of Genius,
or as Sources of Entertainment,” but both in his sophomore and senior
years he was at first privately and then publicly admonished for
excessive absence from recitations and for general negligence in themes,
forensics, and recitations. There was enough of the boy left in him at
the beginning of his senior year to require the fine of a dollar for
cutting seats in the recitation room; and the college discipline of the
day frowned on Lowell as on others for wearing a brown coat on Sunday.
It is difficult for one scanning the records of the faculty at that time
to avoid a feeling of commiseration for these excellent gentlemen and
scholars sitting, as if they were boarding-school masters, in serious
consultation over the pranks and petty insubordination of a parcel of
boys.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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