The boy who had so loved the country among the hills of Connecticut, became gloomy and restless shut in by the treeless city. His father gave him the lives of Nelson and Captain Cook to read, and the lad resolved to go to sea. He could not bring himself to run away without telling his father, which he did. With rare tact Dr. Beecher replied that Henry would not wish to be an ordinary sailor.
"No," said the boy. "I want to be a midshipman, and after that a commodore."
"I see," said the father; "and in order for that you must begin a course of mathematics and study navigation.... I will send you up to Amherst next week, to Mount Pleasant, and there you'll begin your preparatory studies, and if you are well prepared I presume I can make interest to get you an appointment."
At fourteen the lad entered Mount Pleasant Institute, the father hoping and praying that his boy "would be in the ministry yet."
With Lord Nelson and other great commanders in mind, he determined to master his studies and be somebody. Hard mathematics became easier, and he liked the drill in elocution. He enjoyed sport among the boys, and the semi-military methods of the school, but best of all he liked spending his play-hours in caring for beds of pansies and asters.
During a revival at Mount Pleasant, Henry was much moved, and wrote to his father, who advised his coming home to join the church. He did so, though he felt afterwards that the change in his life was not as thorough as he could have wished. However, it obliterated the desire of being a sailor, and turned his thoughts toward the ministry.
When he was seventeen, in 1830, he entered Amherst College. The great beauty of the scenery always had for him an especial charm. "I used to look across the beautiful Connecticut River valley, and at the blue mountains that hedged it in, until my heart swelled and my eyes filled with tears."
In college he was fond of athletic sports, ready in wit, beginning to show his eloquence in debate, an ardent temperance advocate, a lover of rhetoric, botany, and geology, and a warm friend to his classmates. He cared little for the classics; but he read much, especially the old English authors, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others.
Dr. Roswell D. Hitchcock, who was at Amherst with young Beecher, says, "He was by all odds the best debater of his college generation. I should be glad to know how he acquired his mastery of the English language.... The four books which probably helped him most were the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' and Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress.'"
"He was," said Dr. John Haven, a classmate, "a great reader, and probably had more general knowledge than any one of his classmates when he graduated."