All the world was reading Mr. Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee" and Mr. Hay did what all the world was doing.... He read all the poems, but "Chiquita" and "Cicely," which gave him particular pleasure, puzzled him and set him to thinking.... He saw how infinitely nobler and better than nature they were, but, having been born and brought up as a Pike himself, he saw that they were not nature. He wrote "Little Breeches" for his own amusement—at least we have heard this is his account of the matter—to see how a genuine Western feeling expressed in genuine Western language, would impress Western people.... The ballads were written within a few days of each other: two of them in a single evening.[55]
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]
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.
And this entitled "Lacrimas":
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!
* * * * *
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.