Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[154] also, who was small and slight. Lowell was not then a handsome boy, but he had very fine eyes and that Apollo look about the brow which lighted up a somewhat heavy face. He and I, with my brother and William Story, afterward eminent as a sculptor, had the happiness to be the only day scholars; for the school, although by no means one of the Dotheboys Hall type, was yet emphatically of the “Early English” style, the boys being ruled by a pretty strenuous birch during school hours, and at other times left herded together with little supervision. Story was already the intimate friend of Lowell, and rather took the lead of him, being then the Steerforth of the school, joyous, full of life, and variously accomplished. Many a time I have walked up and down what is now Brattle Street, listening reverently to the talk of these older boys, not always profitable, but sometimes most valuable. I remember, for instance, their talking over the plot of Spenser's “Faerie Queene” years before I had read it, and making it so interesting that we younger urchins soon named a nook with shady apple trees near