He was brought up in an atmosphere of ease and refinement, receiving his preparatory education in private schools, and entering Princeton in 1840.  On the testimony of Leland, who, being related to Boker, was thrown with him in their early years, and who avows that he always showed a love for the theatre, we learn that the young college student bore that same distinction of manner which had marked him as a child, and was to cling to him as a diplomat.  Together as boys, these two would read their “Percy’s Reliques,” “Don Quixote,” Byron and Scott—­and while they were both in Princeton, Boker’s room possessed the only carpet in the dormitory, and his walls boasted shelves of the handsomest books in college.

“As a mere schoolboy,” wrote Leland, “Boker’s knowledge of poetry was remarkable.  I can remember that he even at nine years of age manifested that wonderful gift that caused him many years after to be characterized by some great actor—­I think it was Forrest—­as the best reader in America....  While at college ...  Shakespeare and Byron were his favourites.  He used to quiz me sometimes for my predilections for Wordsworth and Coleridge.  We both loved Shelly passionately.”

In fact, Leland claims that Boker was given to ridicule the “Lakers;” had he studied them instead, he would have added to his own poetry a naturalness of expression which it lacked.

He was quite the poet of Princeton in his day, quite the gentleman Bohemian.  “He was,” writes Leland, “quite familiar, in a refined and gentlemanly way, with all the dissipations of Philadelphia and New York.”  His easy circumstances made it possible for him to balance his ascetic taste for scholarship with riding horse-back.  To which almost perfect attainment, he added the skilled ability to box, fence and dance.  He graduated from Princeton in 1842, and the description of him left to us by Leland reveals a young man of nineteen, six feet tall, whose sculptured bust, made at this time, was not as much like him “as the ordinary busts of Lord Byron.”  In later years he was said to bear striking resemblance to Hawthorne.  His marriage to Miss Julia Riggs, of Maryland, followed shortly after his graduation, in fact, while he was studying law, a profession which was to serve him in good stead during his diplomatic years, but which he threw over for the stronger pull of poetry, whose Muse he could court without the necessity of driving it hard for support.  Yet he was concerned about literature as a paying profession for others.  On April 26, 1851, he wrote to Stoddard:  “Alas! alas!  Dick, is it not sad that an American author cannot live by magazine writing?  And this is wholly owing to the want of our international copyright law.  Of course it is little to me whether magazine writers get paid or not; but it is so much to you, and to a thousand others.”  The time, until 1847, was spent in foreign travel, but it is interesting to note, as indication of no mean literary attainment in the interim, that Princeton, during this period, bestowed on him the degree of M.A., for merit in letters.