Hitherto, the life of a schoolmaster had been his utmost ambition, and the trials he made satisfied him that, with his love of knowledge and desire to impart it, he would ultimately be able to succeed. The prospect of a college course had not yet dawned on him. But, from his patron Loomis to others of greater influence the carpenter's merit spread wider and wider, until the Rev. Abiel Abbott, then a clergyman at Coventry, Connecticut, procured for him a scholarship at Phillips Exeter Academy, upon a benevolent foundation, to which meritorious pupils of limited means were admitted without charge for board and instruction. On the 4th of September, 1809, he left Tolland, Connecticut, and _walked_ the one hundred and twenty miles to Exeter, New Hampshire, becoming a scholar of the Academy for two years. Here he first met, as fellow pupils, his life-long friends, Palfrey and Bancroft. He studied diligently, and made rapid progress; yet, anxious to preserve his independence, and to obtain what was necessary for his personal comfort without further tax on friends or obligation to strangers, he taught, during one winter of these two years, a school at Rochester in New Hampshire. In one of his memorandums he sums up his tuition thus: "the whole amount of my schooling was about forty months, which was the length of time I attended school before I was _twenty_ years old." But the great hope of his heart--a hope that had been gradually kindled--was at last to be realized, and, in 1811, at the age of twenty-two, through the active interest of President Kirkland, Sparks entered Harvard University, on a Pennoyer scholarship. Yet, the _res angusta domi_ pursued him still. It is said, that, "in consequence partly of ill health and partly of poverty," he was unable to pass more than two entire years, of his four, at Cambridge. To eke out a slender but necessary income, he obtained leave of absence during parts of his Freshman and Sophomore years, and spent the time as a private teacher in the family of Mr. Mark Pringle, at Havre de Grace, Maryland. He was there when the British, under Admiral Cockburn, plundered and partly destroyed the village; and here, probably, he enjoyed the only military experience of his life, by serving, as a private, in the Maryland militia, called out to guard the neighborhood. The inhabitants, it is related, generally fled to the woods, and but few, among whom was Sparks, remained to witness the barbarous behaviour of the enemy. Fifteen months of this leave of absence were, thus, spent in our State, in the bosom of an excellent and refined family, by whose members he was warmly esteemed; and, at length, he received his degree of Bachelor of Arts, at Harvard, with the class of 1815.