A BLESSING
TO THE YOUNG
THE GOLDEN CALF
THE AZRA
GOOD AND BAD LUCK
L'AMOUR DU MENSONGE
AMOR MYSTICUS



INTRODUCTION.



Pike County Ballads and other poems in this volume by Colonel John Hay
represent in the best manner the spirit of our strong and independent
sister-land across the Atlantic. Pike County Ballads do full justice to
the raw material in the United States, and show a loyal temper in the
rough. The other pieces show how the love of freedom speaks through
finer spirits of the land, and, dealing with realities, can turn a life
of action into music.

Colonel Hay has lived always in vigorous relation with the full life of
the people whose best mind his poems represent. He is descended from a
Scottish soldier, a John Hay, who, at the beginning of the last century,
left his country to take service under the Elector-Palatine, and whose
son went afterwards with his family to settle among the Kentucky
pioneers. Dr. Charles Hay was the father of John Hay the poet, who was
born on the 8th of October 1838, in the heart of the United States, at
Salem in Indiana. When twenty years old he graduated at the