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." No more
authentic inspiration ever visited a poet, and though Bryant
wrote verse for more than sixty years after that crimson sky had
paled into chill December twilight, his lines never again
vibrated with such communicative passion.

Bryant's ensuing career revealed the steady purpose, the
stoicism, the reticence of the Puritan. It was highly successful,
judged even by material standards. "Thanatopsis" had been
instantly regarded in 1817 as the finest poem yet produced in
America. The author was invited to contribute to the "North
American Review" an essay on American poetry, and this, like all
of Bryant's prose work, was admirably written. He delivered his
Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, "The Ages," in 1821, the year of
Emerson's graduation. After a brief practice of the law in Great
Barrington, he entered in 1826 into the unpromising field of
journalism in New York. While other young Knickerbockers wasted
their literary strength on trifles and dissipated their moral