This seems all the more reasonable after we have considered Hay's earlier poetic ideals. He had been born into a refined home in the middle West, the son of a doctor and a New England mother, and he had grown up amid books and intellectual ideals. At the age of thirteen he had been sent to his uncle in Pike County, Illinois, to attend a private school which proved to be of such excellent quality that three years later he was prepared to enter the Sophomore class at Brown. His life at Providence awakened within him new ideals. He was invited into the literary circle of the little city where he came to know Mrs. Whitman, whose life at one time had touched that of Poe, and more significant still, Nora Perry, the poet, a kindred soul. Graduating at nineteen, the poet of his class, he went back to Warsaw, the little Mississippi River town of his boyhood, dreaming the dreams of a poet. But the outlook for the young dreamer was a depressing one. "I am removed to a colder mental atmosphere," he wrote to Miss Perry. In the West, "I find only a dreary waste of heartless materialism, where great and heroic qualities may indeed bully their way up into the glare, but the flowers of existence inevitably droop and wither."[56] He wrote much poetry during this early period--translations of Heine, Longfellow-like poems of beauty, and stirring lyrics to Miss Perry, who kept alive his poetic dreams with letters and poems, among them her "After the Ball" which she had shown him before it appeared in the _Atlantic_. No Pike County notes in this period: he was filled with the vision that even then was inspiring the little transition school of poets struggling along the old paths: Stedman, Stoddard, Aldrich, Hayne, Sill, and the others. 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]