Page 67 - Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor

And here is Harvard Square, where stand the buildings of the famous
college:

"A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare Common, with ample

elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through
the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery
rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia

general who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. People still
lived who regretted the unhappy separation from the mother island. . . The

hooks were to be seen from which swung the hammocks of Burgoyne's
captive redcoats. If memory does not deceive me, women still washed
clothes in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia. Commencement had

not ceased to be the great holiday of the Puritan Commonwealth, and a
fitting one it was--the festival of Santa Scholastica, whose triumphal path

one may conceive strewn with leaves of spelling-books instead of bay."

James was the youngest of four brothers and two sisters, a handsome boy,

and his mother's darling. He always thought he inherited his love of nature
and poetic aspirations from her, whose family was from the Orkneys--those

islands at the extreme north of Scotland.

His father was a strikingly handsome man, gracious and of rare personal

qualities, and a faithful pastor over his flock. Often he took his youngest
son on long drives with him, when he went to exchange pulpits with

neighboring clergymen. Because of his wide family connection, and his
father's position, James saw not a little of New England society as it was in
those days, pure Yankee through and through.

CHAPTER II

AN IMPETUOUS YOUNG MAN

Young James was sent first to a dame school, as a private school for very
small children kept by a lady in her own house was called in those days.

But when he was eight or nine he was sent to a boarding school near