He wished to
continue his education at Yale, but his father had no money for
this greater venture, and the son remained at home. There, in the
autumn of 1811, on the bleak hills, he composed the first draft
of "Thanatopsis." He was seventeen, and he had been reading
Blair's "Grave" and the poems of the consumptive Henry Kirke
White.
He hid his verses in a drawer, and five years later his father
found them, shed tears over them, and sent them to the "North
American Review," where they were published in September, 1817.
In the meantime the young man had studied law, though with
dislike of it, and with the confession that he sometimes read
"The Lyrical Ballads" when he might have been reading Blackstone.
One December afternoon in 1815, he was walking from Cummington to
Plainfield--aged twenty-one, and looking for a place in which to
settle as a lawyer. Across the vivid sunset flew a black duck, as
solitary and homeless as himself. The bird seemed an image of his
own soul, "lone wandering but not lost." Before he slept that
night he had composed the poem "To a Waterfowl.
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