Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/242

 226 Writers of Familiar Verse will, reading in books rather than through them. "I like books," he told us later; "I was born and bred among them and have the easy feeling when I get into their presence, that a stable boy has among horses." When he was fifteen he was sent to Phillips Academy at Andover; and at sixteen he entered Harvard, graduating in 1829, eight years after Emerson and nine before Lowell. Among his classmates were James Free- man Clarke^ and S. F. Smith, the author of America (1832). He wrote freely for the college papers, both in prose and verse, preserving in his collected works only a very few of his earlier humorous lyrics. Upon his graduation he hesitated as to his profession, spending a year at the Dana Law School without awakening any liking for the law, and confessing later that "the seduction of verse-writing" had made this period "less profitable than it should have been." Yet it was while he was supposed to be studying law, and when he was just twenty-one, that he wrote the first of his poems to achieve an immediate and lasting popularity. This was the fiery lyric on Old Ironsides, pro- testing against the breaking up of the frigate Constitution, victor in the naval duel with the Guerrihre. The glowing stanzas were written in a white heat of indignation against the proposed degradation of a national glory; they were published in 1830 in the Boston Advertiser; they were copied in news- papers aU over the country; they were reprinted on broad- sides; and they accomplished their purpose of saving the ship, which did not go out of commission for more than half a century after Holmes had rhymed his fervent appeal for its preservation. At last he turned from the law to medicine, the profession of his grandfather. He studied for a while at the private school of Dr. James Jackson; and then he crossed the Atlantic 'to profit by the superior instruction to be had in Paris. Half a century later he recorded: I was in Europe about two years and a half, from April, 1833, to October, 1835. I sailed in the packet ship "Philadelphia" from New York to Portsmouth, where we arrived after a passage of twenty-four days. ... I then crossed the channel to Havre, from » See Book II, Chap. viii.