Born Charleston, S. C., 1 Jan. 1830; died “Copse Hill,” Grovetown, Ga., 6 July 1886. He was graduated at the University of South Carolina, gave up the practice of law for literature, and edited successively, “Russell’s Magazine,” the Charleston “Literary Gazette” and “Evening News.” He was a colonel in the Confederate army, and wrote several popular Confederate songs. The war undermining his health and destroying his home, he retired with his family to a cottage, “Copse Hill,” at Grovetown, in the pine barrens near Augusta, Ga. Hayne was long our representative Southern poet, honored and beloved by his colleagues in all portions of the United States, and by not a few of the Motherland. He issued “Poems,” 1855; “Sonnets and Other Poems,” 1857; “Avolio, a Legend of Cos,” 1859; “Legends and Lyrics,” 1872; “The Mountain of the Lovers, and Other Poems,” 1873. He wrote a memoir of Henry Timrod, 1873; and lives of Hugh S. Legaré and of his uncle, Robert Y. Hayne, 1878. An elegant edition of his complete poems appeared in 1882.

Personal

  No poet was ever more blessed in a wife, and she it is, who, by her self-renunciation, her exquisite sympathy, her positive, material help, her bright hopefulness, has made endurable the losses and trials that have crowded Mr. Hayne’s life. Those who know how to read between the lines can see everywhere the influence of this irradiating and stimulating presence.

	Though round him shone the singer’s aureole,
	His mighty heart was simple as a boy’s.
	His pine woods felt him, and his loved winds blow,
	For requiem, round his more than palace home.
	Dumb the King’s mortal lips, for aye; but, lo!
	Through what he wrote the soul is never dumb,
	Though the stars, wheeling proudly, seem to know
	That he who loved them to his own is come.

  In the earlier years of his literary career he would frequently awake at night, get out of bed, light a candle, and compose many lines upon some poem which he said had “forced itself upon his mind.” He was more systematic in writing prose than verse, although many characteristic specimens of the former may be found in the fly-leaves of all kinds of books. When engaged in preparing an essay, a book-review, a story, the copying of manuscript for the printer, or the claims of a large correspondence, he would usually go to his standing-desk in the morning, soon after breakfast, and write for hours. In reading a book he often made marginal comments with his pencil, and always marked the passages that impressed him most. These proved aids to reflection, and sometimes from the simplest of them the suggestion for a poem would be utilized. As a rule, perhaps, my father wrote prose more rapidly and satisfactorily under pressure, and the same may be said of some of his elaborate poems. He became alert “when he could hear the printing-press clattering behind him,” and would have agreed with Sir Walter Scott in saying, “I cannot pull well in long traces, when the draught is too far behind me!” My father said more than once, when pressed to finish proof-sheets, “I will make it up at the last heat.”

  Hayne, though at times a partisan where his friends were concerned, was essentially a noble spirit; the noblest and most charming character, with the exception of Simms, to be found among Southern writers, one is almost tempted to say, among Southern gentlemen. He wrote the most delightful letters of all of Simms’s correspondents. He was always loyal, always frank, always the gentle lover of what seemed to him to be true and beautiful. When he travelled from home his genial nature won the love of men like Fields and Longfellow. No more simple and refined gentleman was ever nurtured in the old South. If he lacked Simms’s vigor and powers of varied accomplishment, or Timrod’s artistic self-control, his genius was, nevertheless, more receptive, more keenly alive to the beauties of nature and of art. Without lacking virility, he charms chiefly by his possession of traits of character distinctively feminine. His gentleness, his receptivity, his delicacy of feeling, his facility in surrendering himself to the dominion of master minds, are all feminine traits, some of which have impaired the value of his poetry, but which have combined to give a unique charm to his personality.

  I shall always hold pleasant memory of a visit I made to Hayne’s lonely home, amid the arid pine hills of Georgia, in November, 1881…. He was neither short nor tall, five feet eight I should say, slender, straight, with a well-poised head, a long face, brown eyes of an Oriental cast slightly lifted at the outer corners, dark hair and moustache, rather thick lips, a well-turned chin, straight nose, high, narrowish forehead and bronzed cheeks barely tinged with a network of fine red veins. There was a strong resemblance between his face and that of the late Robert Louis Stevenson. I was surprised that he did not look like an invalid; for he had often written me about his hopeless physical condition. Later, upon closer observation, some constitutional lesion became vaguely apparent.

General

  There are several that Tennyson might have written without damage to his reputation as the first artist among English poets…. Mr. Hayne has written sonnets very much as clever as any in English. I neither except Stoddard, who has done well; nor Boker, whose success is marked; nor even Wordsworth, the Magnus Apollo of British sonneteers. Nor do I mean any very great compliment to Mr. Hayne, in these comparisons…. Mr. Hayne has an intense love of Nature; a rich imagination, quick and bold; limited power of narrative structure, and a true sense of the music of words. His study of Tennyson has been in the spirit of the true artist. In the glowing sensuousness of his imagery one is sometimes reminded of Alexander Smith; but he has a refinement and an art-finish that Smith could never have attained. His poetry is alive with pent passion, glowing yet repressed; a tropical wealth of emotion, touched here and there with a dash of quaintness or a flaw of affectation. He is fervent, but sometimes feeble; musical and dainty in phraseology; full of earnestness, tenderness, and delicacy. Over some of his exquisite ideal poems there hangs a veil of mourning so vivid and startling, that in the complex beauty of sorrow one is puzzled, while charmed.

  Hayne exhibits in all his pieces a rich sensuousness of nature, a seemingly exhaustless fertility of fancy, an uncommon felicity of poetic description, and an easy command of the harmonies of verse.

  A poem (“Fire Pictures”) which in point of variety and delicacy of fancy is quite the best of his collection, and in point of pure music should be placed beside Edgar Poe’s “Bells.”… It is a poem to be read aloud; a true recitativo. The energy of its movements, the melody of its metres, the changes of its rhythm, the variety of its fancies, the artistic advance to its climax, particularly the management of its close, where at one and the same time, by the devices of onomatopeia and of rhythmical imitation, are doubly interpreted the sob of a man and the flicker of a flame so perfectly that sob, flicker, word, rhythm, each appears to represent the other, and to be used convertibly with the other in such will-o’-wisp transfigurations as quite vanish in mere description,—all these elements require for full enjoyment that the actual music of the poem should fall upon the ear.

  Hayne’s vitality, courage, and native lyrical impulse have kept him in voice, and his people regard him with a tenderness which, if a commensurate largesse were added, should make him feel less solitary among his pines.

	The man is dead; the bard shall never die;
	Though clay lie cold and eloquent voice be stilled,
	The poet lingers; wood and field and sky
	And the far spaces by his soul are filled.
	For him all times and seasons shall remain,
	And thy best name, O South! shall still be Hayne.

	Pure was the fount of song from which he drew
	Rare pearls of thought, as clear as morning dew;
	His was the heritage of Orphic fires!
	The clarion note his lyric lips out-blew
	Was one of noble deeds and high desires.

	As the earlier dews of Spring will throng
	Bright on some flower that gives to breeze or bee
	Its delicate symmetries and fragrant breath,
	Even so, for years, clung shining round your song
	The certitude of immortality,
	The faith in resurrection after death!

  In estimating Hayne’s permanent worth as a poet, it is impossible not to compare him with other typical Southern poets. He is certainly not the equal of Lanier in shaping imagination, nor of Pinkney in lyric charm; it would be saying a great deal in either case, if he were. When we compare him with his friend Timrod, whose claims Hayne so chivalrously preferred to his own, it is evident that Timrod was the superior in fire, lyric force, and a certain wealth of utterance; and Hayne in sweetness, dignity, and self-control…. Hayne’s was certainly the higher nature; when his songs were most nearly red-hot, they did not, like Timrod’s, call the Union armies Goths and Huns, and they were free from the almost brutal tone of wrath and revenge with which Timrod rejoices over the imagined desolation of New York…. This great fineness of temperament undoubtedly helped Hayne’s later career; it made it easy for him to strike hands with old foes; and nothing can be more generous or impassioned than his verses of thanks for the Northern aid given at a later time to the Southern cities. His longer poems are, like the longer poems of most bards, unsuccessful; and the reader turns gladly from these to his verses upon the two themes where he is strong—home affections and the enjoyments derived from external nature. The beauty and delicate tenderness of the former have been already mentioned; and the outdoor poems have the merit of using material unhackneyed and often untouched…. Above all special merits of description, there is in these outdoor poems a charm which comes from a certain wild note, something akin to the delicate song of the blue-bird and to all soft spring scents; the expression of a lonely life amidst virgin woods and unspoiled solitudes. One may detect something of the same note in some of Bryant’s earlier poems, but in Hayne’s it is softer, richer, sweeter.

  “The Mountain of the Lovers,” the “Macrobian Bow,” “Macdonald’s Raid,” “Unveiled,” the “Vengeance of the Goddess Diana,” and the “Solitary Lake,” are works worth the crown of an academy. As a sonnetteer, Hayne was strong, ranking well with the best in America, and his descriptive verse is often very melodious and full of warm, harmonious color. His muse never was quite Southern, though the man was; and we feel as we read, that Keats and Shelley and Tennyson and Wordsworth have influenced him almost as much as the blue skies, the fiery sun, and the moaning pines of the sub-tropic. And yet what intensely radical Southern sentiment he sometimes voiced! On the other hand, too, what luxury of Southern sights, sounds, tastes, perfumes, and colors we enjoy in his poem, “Muscadines,” than which no lesser genius than Shelley or Keats ever penned a better or a richer.

  His verse displays the wealth and warmth of the landscape of South Carolina and Georgia, the loneliness of the “pine barrens” where nature seems unmolested, or the swish of the wild Southern sea. As a sonnetteer, too, his place is not far below Longfellow’s; American achievements in this important division of verse have not been inconsiderable. When Hayne, for a short period in his life, fell under the influence of Morris-mediævalism, the merit of his verse dwindled to that of occasional lines or passages; but when he sang his own song in his own land it was that of a true poet, who heard

	‘Low words of alien music, softly sung,
	And rhythmic sighs in some sweet unknown tongue.”

Far from the distributing centres of literature, and unaided by the stimulus or the criticism that come alone from association with brother authors, Hayne wrote too much, nor polished with sufficiently painstaking art.

  The impassioned but too impetuous, too regardlessly profuse singer of the south.

  Hayne’s poems are not all of equal interest, but every now and then one comes upon something very striking. Where he felt strongly he had stirring eloquence; what he knew familiarly he could paint vividly.

  Hayne has written war lyrics, but he excelled in domestic sketches and in short pieces of quiet reflection on the subject of natural landscape, having the feeling of contentment that must precede repose in poetry.

  His prose works, some of which are idyllic in beauty, have not been collected in any form. These things ought not to be, since his works are part of the heritage, the treasure, and the heroism of a people. In his prose more than in his poetry he touches the transient and current, sometimes impaling follies with a sharp pen, and other times with the touch of a painter turning out sketches of persons and places aglow with life and dramatic power—sketches which shall ever be of increasing interest to the historian as well as to the lover of the beautiful…. “Poet laureate of the South!” Yes, that title by divine right belongs to Hayne. If the earliest and most constant loyalty to the Muse, a steady flame of poetic fervor, and the production of the largest amount of good poetry be the test, then the honor of that uncrowned preëminence goes easily to the poet of “Copse Hill.”

  Hayne belongs distinctively to the artistic imaginative school of lyrists. Had he removed to New York, he would without doubt have become one of that select circle whose leaders are now Stedman and Stoddard. His ability as a literary craftsman is shown by his marked success with the sonnet, that unfailing indicator of poetic skill; his true lyric power appears in his songs of the war. He did for the South what Whittier did for the North. The lyrics “My Motherland,” “Stonewall Jackson,” “The Little White Glove,” and above all “Beyond the Potomac,” indicate the high-water mark of the Southern poetry of the Rebellion. Hayne also had great success as a narrative poet, ranking in this department only second to Bayard Taylor.

  Paul Hamilton Hayne, a gentleman of South Carolina, his house burned in the bombardment of Charleston, his library scattered, his store of family silver lost, started life anew, with enfeebled health, in a shanty among the Georgia pines. Overcoming a thousand obstacles, the faithful poet “beat his music out,” but apart from the trumpet tone of his war-songs, it was a music in the minor key.

  He was not the high-priest of nature in the broadest sense. He does not disclose the range of imagination, the loftiness of conception, the profound meditativeness of the Northern masters, but he sings his notes as naturally as a bird carolling in the tree tops. So genuine is his voice, so true in tone, so musical, that it is questionable if he should be classed among our minor poets. In the silvery melody of his verse he forcibly recalls Poe, of whom he was evidently a sympathetic student. It would be difficult to find in literature a more appropriate picture of Southern scenery than in his “Aspects of the Pines.”

  He has left ten times as much verse as Timrod, not all valuable, nor even natural and strong. But in him too there is much real poetry, much true local color.