An equally important influence upon his early youth was the out-of-door life at Elmwood.  To the love of nature his soul was early dedicated, and no American poet has more truthfully and beautifully interpreted the inspired teachings of nature, whispered through the solemn tree-tops or caroled by the happy birds.  The open fields surrounding Elmwood and the farms for miles around were his familiar playground, and furnished daily adventures for his curious and eager mind.  The mere delight of this experience with nature, he says, “made my childhood the richest part of my life.  It seems to me as if I had never seen nature again since those old days when the balancing of a yellow butterfly over a thistle bloom was spiritual food and lodging for a whole forenoon.”  In the Cathedral is an autobiographic passage describing in a series of charming pictures some of those choice hours of childhood: 

    “One summer hour abides, what time I perched,
    Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves,
    And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof
    An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled,
    Denouncing me an alien and a thief.”

Quite like other boys Lowell was subjected to the processes of the more formal education of books.  He was first sent to a “dame school,” and then to the private school of William Wells, under whose rigid tuition he became thoroughly grounded in the classics.  Among his schoolfellows was W.W.  Story, the poet-sculptor, who continued his life-long friend.  Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was one of the younger boys of the school, recalls the high talk of Story and Lowell about the Fairie Queen.  At fifteen he entered Harvard College, then an institution with about two hundred students.  The course of study in those days was narrow and dull, a pretty steady diet of Greek, Latin and Mathematics, with an occasional dessert of Paley’s Evidences of Christianity or Butler’s Analogy.  Lowell was not distinguished for scholarship, but he read omnivorously and wrote copiously, often in smooth flowing verse, fashioned after the accepted English models of the period.  He was an editor of Harvardiana, the college magazine, and was elected class poet in his senior year.  But his habit of lounging with the poets in the secluded alcoves of the old library, in preference to attending recitations, finally became too scandalous for official forbearance, and he was rusticated, “on account of constant neglect of his college duties,” as the faculty records state.  He was sent to Concord, where his exile was not without mitigating profit, as he became acquainted with Emerson and Thoreau.  Here he wrote the class poem, which he was permitted to circulate in print at his Commencement.  This production, which now stands at the head of the list of his published works, was curiously unprophetic of his later tendencies.  It was written in the neatly, polished couplets of the Pope type and other imitative metres, and aimed to satirize the radical movements of the period, especially the transcendentalists and abolitionists, with both of whom he was soon to be in active sympathy.