"Why are not your countrymen all poets, surrounded as they are by
beautiful things to inspire them?" I asked a young Swiss.
"Because," he replied, "my people are so accustomed to beauty that it
has no influence upon them."
They had never known anything but beauty: there were no sharp
contrasts to clash, flint-like, and strike out sparks of divine fire.
Had the beauty of old Charleston produced the same negative effect,
Southern literature would have suffered a distinct loss--if that may
be regarded as lost which has never been possessed. For centuries the
Queen of the Sea stood in a vision of splendor, the tumultuous waves
of the Atlantic dashing at her feet, eternal sunshine crowning her
royal brow. Her gardens were stately with oleanders and pomegranates,
brilliant with jonquils and hyacinths, myrtle and gardenia. Roses of
the olden time, Lancaster and York and the sweet pink cinnamon,
breathed the fragrance of days long past. The hills that environed her
were snowy with Cherokee roses and odorous with jasmine and
honeysuckle. Her people dwelt in mansions in the corridors of which
ancestral ghosts from Colonial days kept guard.
In old Charleston that goes back in history almost a century before
the Revolution and extends to the opening of the Sixties--the old
Queen City by the Sea, which now few are left to remember--was a
circle of congenial creative souls just before the first shot at Fort
Sumter heralded the destruction of the old-time life of the Colonial
city. William Gilmore Simms was the head and mentor of the brilliant
little band, and the much younger men, Paul Hamilton Hayne and Henry
Timrod, were the fiery souls that gave it the mental electricity
necessary to furnish the motive power. Through all the coming days of
trial and hardship, of aspiration and defeat, of watching from the
towers of high achievement or lying prone in the valley of failure,
not one of that little circle ever lost the golden memory of those
magic evenings in the home of the novelist and poet, the thinker and
dreamer, William Gilmore Simms, the intellectual father of them all.
At that time in the old city was another picturesque home that harked
back to Colonial days--stately, veranda-circled, surrounded by that
fascinating atmosphere of history and poetry known to those old
dwellings alone of all the structures of the New World: the home of
the Southern poet of Nature, Paul Hamilton Hayne. Its many-windowed
front looked cheerfully out upon a wide lawn radiant with flowers of
bygone fashion, loved by the poets of olden times, and bright with the
greenery that kept perpetual summer around the historic dwelling. This
beautiful pre-Revolutionary home was burned in the bombardment of
Charleston, and with it was destroyed the library that had been the
pride of the poet's heart.
In this old home the Poet of the Pines was born of a family that
looked back to the opening days of the eighteenth century, when
Charleston was young, glowing with the beauty of her birth into the
forests of the New World, wearing proudly the tiara of her loyalty to
King and Crown. Looking back along the road that stretched between the
first Hayne, who helped to make of the old city a memory to be
cherished on the page of history and a picture on the canvas of the
present to awaken admiration, and the young soul that looked with
poetic vision on the beginning of the new era, one sees a long
succession of brilliant names and powerful figures.
Paul Hayne was the great-grand-nephew of "the Martyr Hayne," who has
given to Charleston her only authentic ghost-story, the scene of which
was a brick dwelling which stood till 1896 at the corner of Atlantic
and Meeting Streets. Colonel Isaac H. Hayne, a soldier of the
Revolution, secured a parole, that he might be with his dying wife.
While on parole he was ordered to fight against his country. Rather
than be forced to the crime of treason, he broke his parole, was
captured and condemned to death. From her beautiful, mahogany-panelled
drawing-room in that old home where the two streets cross, his
sister-in-law, who had gone with his two little children to plead for
his life, watched as he passed on his way from the vault of the old
Custom House, used then as a prison, to the gallows. "Return, return
to us!" she called in an agony of grief. As he walked on he replied,
"If I can I will." It is said that his old negro mammy, to whom he was
always "my chile," ran out to the gate with the playthings she had
fondly cherished since the days when they were to him irresistible
attractions, crying, "Come back! Come back!" To both calls his heart
responded with such longing love that when the soul was released, the
old home knew the step and the voice again. Ever afterward when
eventide fell, one standing at that window would hear a ghostly voice
from the street below and steps upon the stairs and in the hall;
footsteps of one coming--never going.
Paul Hamilton Hayne's uncle, Colonel Arthur P. Hayne, fought under
Jackson at New Orleans, and was afterward United States Senator. Paul
was nephew of Robert Y. Hayne, whose career as a statesman and an
orator won for him a fame that has not faded with the years. With this
uncle, Paul found a home in his orphaned childhood.
Of his sailor father, Lieutenant Hayne, his shadowy memory takes form
in a poem, one stanza of which gives us a view of the brave seaman's
life and death:
He perished not in conflict nor in flame,
No laurel garland rests upon his tomb;
Yet in stern duty's path he met his doom;
A life heroic, though unwed to fame.
Though he pathetically mourns:
Never in childhood have I blithely sprung
To catch my father's voice, or climb his knee,
still
Love limned his wavering likeness on my soul,
Till through slow growths it waxed a perfect whole
Of clear conceptions, brightening heart and mind.
That clear conception remained a lifelong treasure in the poet's
heart.
Through a great ancestral corridor had Paul Hamilton Hayne descended,
with soul enjewelled with all the gems of character and thought that
had sparkled in the long gallery through which he had travelled into
the earth-light.
In the school of Mr. Coates, in Charleston, he was fitted to enter
Charleston College, a plain, narrow-fronted structure with six
severely classic columns supporting the façade. It stood on the
foundation of the "old brick barracks" held by the Colonial troops
through a six-weeks siege by twelve thousand British regulars under
Sir Henry Clinton.
Hayne satisfied the hunger and thirst of his excursive and ardent mind
by browsing in the Charleston Library on Broad and Church streets. It
may be that sometimes, on his way to that friendly resort, he passed
the old house on Church Street which once sheltered General
Washington; a substantial three-storied building with ornamental
woodwork which might cause its later use as a bakery to seem out of
harmony to any but _chefs_ with high ideals of their art.
The Library of old Charleston was composed chiefly of English classics
and the literature of France in the olden time when Europe furnished
us with something more than anarchy, clothes, and bargain-counter
titles. A sample of the Young America of that early day asked an old
gentleman, "Why are you always reading that old Montaigne?" The reply
was, "Why, child, there is in this book all that a gentleman needs to
think about," with the discreet addition, "Not a book for little
girls, though." If we find in our circle of poets a certain
stateliness of style scarcely to be looked for in a somewhat new
republic that might be expected to rush pell-mell after an idea and
capture it by the sudden impact of a lusty blow, after the manner of
the minute-men catching a red-coat at Lexington; if we observe in
their writing old world expressions that woo us subtly, like the odor
of lavender from a long-closed linen chest, we may attribute it to the
fact that aristocratic old Charleston, though the first to assert her
independence of the political yoke, yet clung tenaciously to the
literary ideals of the Old World.
On Meeting Street was Apprentices' Library Hall, where Glidden led his
hearers through the intricacies of Egyptian Archæology. Here Agassiz
sometimes lectured on Zoölogy, and our youthful poet may have watched
animals from the jungle climb up the blackboard at the touch of what
would have been only a piece of chalk in any other hand, but became a
magic creative force under the guidance of that wizard of science.
Here he could have followed with Thackeray the varying fortunes and
ethic vagaries of the royal Georges. His poetic soul may have kindled
with the fire of Macready's "Hamlet" when, thinking that he was too
far down the slope of life to hark back to the days of the youthful
Dane, he proved that he still had the glow of the olden time in his
soul by reading the part as only Macready could. In this old hall he
may have looked upon the paintings which inspired him to create his
own pictures, luminous with softly tinted word-colors.
Meeting Street seems to have been named with reference to its uses,
for here, too, was the old theatre, gone long ago, where Fannie
Ellsler danced with a wavering, quivering, shimmering grace that drove
humming-birds to despair. In that theatre it may be that Paul Hayne
heard Jenny Lind fill the night with a melody which would irradiate
his soul throughout life and reproduce itself in the music-tones of
his gently cadenced verse. There the ill-fated Adrienne Lecouvreur
lived and died again in her wondrous transmigration into the soul of
the great Rachel.
When a boy, Hayne's heart may have often thrilled to the voice of the
scholarly Hugh Swinton Legare, as he made the heart of some classic
old poem live in the music of his organ-tones.
A sensitive soul surrounded by the influences of life in old
Charleston had many incentives to high and harmonious expression.
That the Queen City of the Sea did not claim the privilege of the
fickleness alleged to be incident to the feminine character is
illustrated by the fact that she had but two postmasters in seventy
years, a circumstance worthy of note "in days like these, when ev'ry
gate is thronged with suitors, all the markets overflow," and the
disbursing counter is crowded with claimants for the rewards due for
commendable activity in the campaign. One of those two was Peter
Bascot, an appointee of Washington. The other was Alfred Huger, "the
last of the Barons," who had refused to take the office in the time of
Bascot.
In old Charleston the servants were the severest sticklers for
propriety, and the butlers of the old families rivalled each other in
the loftiness of their standards. Jack, the butler of "the last of the
Barons," was wide awake to the demands of his position, and when an
old sea captain, an intimate friend of Mr. Huger, dining with the
family, asked for rice when the fish was served he was first met with
a chill silence. Thinking that he had not been heard, he repeated the
request. Jack bent and whispered to him. With a burst of laughter, the
captain said, "Judge, you have a treasure. Jack has saved me from
disgrace, from exposing my ignorance. He whispered, 'That would not
do, sir; _we_ never eats rice with fish.'"
Russell's book-shop on King Street was a favorite place of meeting for
the Club which recognized Simms as king by divine right. From these
pleasant gatherings grew the thought of giving to Charleston a medium
through which the productions of her thought might go out to the
world. In April, 1857, appeared _Russell's Magazine_, bearing the
names of Paul Hamilton Hayne and W.B. Carlisle as editors, though upon
Hayne devolved all the editorial work and much of the other writing
for the new publication. He had helped to keep alive the _Southern
Literary Messenger_ after the death of Mr. White and the departure of
Poe for other fields of labor, had assisted Richards on the _Southern
Literary Gazette_ and had been associate editor of Harvey's
_Spectator_. For Charleston had long been ambitious to become the
literary centre of the South. The object of _Russell's Magazine_ was
to uphold the cause of literature in Charleston and in the South, and
incidentally to stand by the friends of the young editor, who carried
his partisanship of William Gilmore Simms so far as to permit the
publication of a severe criticism of Dana's "Household Book of Poetry"
because it did not include any of the verse of the Circle's rugged
mentor. _Russell's_ had a brilliant and brief career, falling upon
silence in March, 1860; probably not much to the regret of Paul Hayne,
who, while too conscientious to withhold his best effort from any
enterprise that claimed him, was too distinctly a poet not to feel
somewhat like Pegasus in pound when tied down to the editorial desk.
This quiet life, in which the gentle soul of Hayne, with its delicate
sensitiveness, poetic insight, and appreciation of all beauty, found
congenial environment, soon suffered a rude interruption. As
Charleston was the first to throw off the yoke of Great Britain and
draw up a constitution which she thought adapted to independent
government, so did she first express the determination of South
Carolina to break the bonds that held her turbulent political soul in
uncongenial association.
Hayne heard the twelve-hour cannonade of Fort Sumter's hundred and
forty guns echoing over the sea, and saw the Stars and Bars flutter
above the walls of the old fort. He saw Generals Bee and Johnson come
back from Manassas, folded in the battle flag for which they had given
their lives, to lie in state in the City Hall at the marble feet of
Calhoun, the great political leader whom they had followed to the
inevitable end. General Lee was in the old town for a little while. A
man said to him, "It is difficult for so many men to abandon their
business for the war." The general replied, "Believe me, sir, the
business of this generation _is_ the war." In the spirit of this
answer Charleston met the crisis so suddenly come upon her.
All the young poet's patriotic love and inherited martial instinct
urged him to the battle, but his frail physique withheld him from the
field, and he took service as an aide on the staff of Governor
Pickens.
At the close of the war, wrecked in health, with only the memory of
his beautiful home and library left to him, with not even a piece of
the family silver remaining from the "march to the sea," Hayne went to
the pine-barrens of Georgia, eighteen miles from Augusta, to build a
new home.
When the first man and woman were sent out from their garden home, it
was not as a punishment for sin, but as an answer to their ambitious
quest for knowledge and their new-born longing for a wider life. It
was not that the gate of Eden was closed upon them; it was that the
gates of all the Edens of the world were opened for them and for the
generations of their children. One of those gates opened upon the Eden
of Copse Hill, where the poet of Nature found a home and all friendly
souls met a welcome that filled the pine-barrens with joy for them. Of
Copse Hill the poet says:
A little apology for a dwelling was perched on the top of a
hill overlooking in several directions hundreds of leagues of
pine-barrens there was as yet neither garden nor inclosure near
it; and a wilder, more desolate and savage-looking home could
hardly have been seen east of the prairies.
What that "little apology of a dwelling" was to him is best pictured
in his own words:
On a steep hillside, to all airs that blow,
Open, and open to the varying sky,
Our cottage homestead, smiling tranquilly,
Catches morn's earliest and eve's latest glow;
Here, far from worldly strife and pompous show,
The peaceful seasons glide serenely by,
Fulfil their missions and as calmly die
As waves on quiet shores when winds are low.
Fields, lonely paths, the one small glimmering rill
That twinkles like a wood-fay's mirthful eye,
Under moist bay-leaves, clouds fantastical
That float and change at the light breeze's will,--
To me, thus lapped in sylvan luxury,
Are more than death of kings, or empires' fall.
Here with "the bonny brown hand" in his that was "dearer than all dear
things of earth" Paul Hayne found a life that was filled with beauty,
notwithstanding its moments of discouragement and pain. We like to
remember that always with him, helping him bear the burdens of life,
was that wifely hand of which the poet could say, "The hand which
points the path to heaven, yet makes a heaven of earth."
On sunny days he paced to and fro under the pines, the many windows of
his mind opened to the studies in light and shade and his soul attuned
to the music of the drifting winds and the whispering trees. When
Nature was in darkened mood and gave him no invitation to the open
court wherein she reigned, he walked up and down his library floor,
engrossed with some beautiful thought which, in harmonious garb of
words, would go forth and bless the world with its music.
The study, of which he wrote:
This is my world! within these narrow walls
I own a princely service
was perhaps as remarkable a room as any in which student ever spent
his working hours, the walls being papered wholly with cuts from
papers and periodicals. The furniture was decorated in the same way,
even to the writing desk, which was an old work bench left by some
carpenters. All had been done by the "bonny brown hands" that never
wearied in loving service.
Many of his friends made pilgrimages to the little cottage on the
hill, where they were cordially welcomed by the poet, who, happy in
his home with his wife and little son, lived among the flowers which
he tended with his own hands, surrounded by the majesty of the pines
whose
Passion and mystery murmur through the leaves,--
Passion and mystery touched by deathless pain,
Whose monotone of long, low anguish grieves
For something lost that shall not live again.
Hither came Henry Timrod, doomed to failure, loss, and early death,
but with soul eternally alive with the fires of genius. In the last
days of his sad and broken life William Gilmore Simms came to renew
old memories and recount the days when life in old Charleston was
iridescent as the waves that washed the feet of the Queen of the Sea.
Congenial spirits they were who met in that charming little study
where Paul Hayne walked "the fields of quiet Arcadies" and
... gleamings of the lost, heroic life
Flashed through the gorgeous vistas of romance.
Hayne had the subtle power of touching the friendliness in the hearts
of those who were far away, as well as of the comrades who had walked
with him along the road of life. Often letters came from friends in
other lands, known to him only by that wireless intuitional telegraphy
whereby kindred souls know each other, though hands have not met nor
eyes looked into eyes. Many might voice the thought expressed by one:
"I may boast that Paul Hayne was my friend, though it was never my
good fortune to meet him." Many a soul was upheld and strengthened by
him, as was that of a man who wrote that he had been saved from
suicide by reading the "Lyric of Action." His album held autographed
photographs of many writers, among them Charles Kingsley, William
Black, and Wilkie Collins. He cherished an ivy vine sent him by
Blackmore from Westminister Abbey.
Hayne's many-windowed mind looked out upon all the phases of the
beauty of Nature. Her varied moods found in him a loving response. He
awaited her coming as the devotee at the temple gate waits for the
approach of his Divinity:
I felt, through dim, awe-laden space,
The coming of thy veiled face;
And in the fragrant night's eclipse
The kisses of thy deathless lips,
Like strange star-pulses, throbbed through space!