But there was no place in the young West for such dreams. He burned much of the poetry he had written and set out sternly to study law in his uncle's office. "I feel that Illinois and Rhode Island are entirely antipathetic," he confessed to Miss Perry. Within him he felt the fires even of genius, he wrote, "but when you reflect how unsuitable such sentiments are to the busy life of the Mississippi Valley, you may imagine then what an overhauling I must receive--at my own hands too. There is, as yet, no room in the West for a genius."[57]
No more poetry. He turned from it out of sheer sense of duty and began with the law. But he was to be no lawyer. In his uncle's office in Springfield he came into intimate contact with Lincoln, and before his law studies had matured at all, he found himself in Washington, the assistant secretary of the new President. Poetry now was out of the question. The war took his every moment, and after the war there was diplomatic service abroad, at Paris, at Vienna, at Madrid. The literary product of this latter period is as far from Pike work as Rhode Island was from Illinois. One may find it in the section of his poems headed "Wanderlieder"--beautiful lyrics of the Longfellow type--"Sunrise in the Place de la Concorde," "The Monks of Basle," "Ernst of Edelsheim," and the like. He brought with him too when he returned in 1870 his Spanish _Sketch Book_, _Castilian Days_, the work of a poet, golden atmosphered, vivid, delightful. In the five years that followed on the _Tribune_ staff he wrote for the magazines his best poems. He was a lyrist with a pen of gold, impassioned at times and impetuous:
Roll on, O shining sun, To the far seas, Bring down, ye shades of eve, The soft, salt breeze! Shine out, O stars, and light My darling's pathway bright, As through the summer night She comes to me.
God send me tears! Loose the fierce band that binds my tired brain, Give me the melting heart of other years, And let me weep again!
We pray in vain! The sullen sky flings down its blaze of brass; The joys of life are scorched and withery pass: I shall not weep again.
Strange company indeed for the Pike County poems. Hay himself was silent about the ballads; he seemed reluctant to talk about them; in later days we know he viewed them with regret.