A comparative study of the poems certainly reveals the fact that one set was influenced by the other. "Cicely" and "Little Breeches" have very much in common. They are in the same meter, and in one place they have practically identical lines:
But I takes mine straight without sugar, and that's what's the matter of me.—Cicely.
I want a chaw of terbacker,
And that's what's the matter with me.
—Little Breeches.
There are similarities in others of the poems:
Don't know Flynn,—
Flynn of Virginia,—
Long as he's been 'yar?
Look 'ee here, stranger,
Whar hev you been?
—In the Tunnel.
Whar have you been for the last three year.
That you haven't heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?
—Jim Bludso.
It must be confessed that a study of the ballads and of the other poetical works of the two poets leaves one with the impression that Harte was first in the field. Hay's six Pike County ballads stand isolated among his poems. Everything he wrote before them and after them is in an utterly different key. One feels as he reads him straight through—the earlier lyrics, Castilian Days, the later lyrics, The Bread-winners, The Life of Lincoln—that these poems came from an impulse, that they must have been thrown off in quick succession all at one time in answer to some sudden impression. One feels, therefore, more like trusting a contemporary biographical sketch than the unsupported impressions of contemporaries thirty years after the event. A sketch of John Hay, written by Clarence King in April, 1874, records that when Hay returned from Spain in 1870