PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE

1830-1886

Paul Hamilton Hayne, a grandson of the distinguished statesman and orator Robert Young Hayne, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on New Year's Day, in 1830. His father, Lieutenant Paul Hamilton Hayne of the United States Navy, died when Paul was a mere infant, and the boy was brought up amid the wealth and luxury of his grandfather's home. He received careful training in the best schools of Charleston, and was graduated from Charleston College in 1850.

Like many young southerners of good family, Hayne prepared himself for the bar, but the call of poetry was stronger than that of the law. He became an associate editor of the Southern Literary Gazette, and later co-founder and editor of Russell's Magazine, which he made a decided success. He published a volume of poems in 1855, and three other volumes followed-Sonnets and Other Poems (1857), Avolio and Other Poems (1860), Legends and Lyrics (1872), and a complete edition of his poems, arranged by himself and published with an introductory biographical sketch by his friend and fellow poet, Margaret J. Preston, about four years before his death on July 6, 1886.

The Civil War came on just in time to interfere seriously with the development of his genius and the spread of his fame. True, he threw himself whole-heartedly into the struggle, writing a number of good war poems; but his muse was better suited to the home, the winter fireside, and the summer forest retreat than to the battle field, the march, and the camp. In spite of his delicate constitution and frail physique he voluntereed his services to the Confederate cause, becoming an aide on Governor Pickens's staff.

Home, library, wealth, all were swept away by the war. When peace came, Hayne moved with his devoted wife and only son, William Hamilton (who is himself a poet of no mean ability), into the pine barrens of Georgia, and settled in a little cottage-or, rather, log cabin-near Augusta.

In this primitive home, which he named "Copse Hill," he spent the remainder of his life, striving to build up his health, and devoting himself exclusively to literature for a livelihood. His poems and prose articles found a ready reception in the magazines and periodicals of the North as well as in those of the South, but the remuneration was small and the family was forced to live under the severest economy.

Hayne's lyric genius has been highly praised, but he is still little more than a name to many readers North and South. He wrote a large amount of poetry of a singularly uniform excellence, but no single poem so far superior to the great mass of his work as to make itself particularly noteworthy or noticeable. Poets of far less literary merit are more generally known, through some single popular work, while Hayne, for the very reason of his uniform excellence, is neglected. He was not strikingly original in his poetry, but he had an individual note, and his art was rarely at fault. He deserves a more generous and general recognition than he has received. His longer narrative poems and his dramatic pieces are not without merit, but his best work is undoubtedly in the purer lyric and descriptive types. Especially noteworthy are his sonnets, of which he wrote considerably more than one hundred. Maurice Thompson said: "As a sonneteer, Hayne was strong, ranking well with the best in America"; and again, "I can pick twenty of Hayne's sonnets to equal almost any in the language"; and Professor Painter adds, "It is hardly too much to claim that Hayne is the prince of American sonneteers."

Paul Hamilton Hayne lived as he wrote-simply, purely, bravely. The latter part of his life was marked by struggle and heartache, privation and disease; yet he kept up his courage and maintained a calm, sweet temper to the end, making of his own life, perhaps, a more beautiful poem than any he ever penned.

(Perhaps the best essays on Hayne are those by Margaret Junkin Preston in the latest edition of his poems [1882] and by William Hamilton Hayne in Lippincott's Magazine for December, 1892.)

ASPECTS OF THE PINES

Tall, somber, grim, against the morning sky
They rise, scarce touched by melancholy airs,
Which stir the fadeless foliage dreamfully,
As if from realms of mystical despairs.

Tall, somber, grim, they stand with dusky gleams
Brightening to gold within the woodland's core,
Beneath the gracious noontide's tranquil beams-
But the weird winds of morning sigh no more.

A stillness, strange, divine, ineffable,

Broods round and o'er them in the wind's surcease,
And on each tinted copse and shimmering dell
Rests the mute rapture of deep-hearted peace.

Last, sunset comes-the solemn joy and might
Borne from the west when cloudless day declines-
Low, flutelike breezes sweep the waves of light,
And lifting dark green tresses of the pines,

Till every lock is luminous-gently float,
Fraught with hale odors up the heavens afar
To faint when twilight on her virginal throat
Wears for a gem the tremulous vesper star.