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THE MAGAZINE OF POETRY.

VOL. I.

NO. 4.

PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE.

“IN

N the month of December, 1844, died, near Columbus, Georgia, one of the truest and sweetest lyric poets this country has yet produced." So wrote Paul Hamilton Hayne in his introduction to the poems of his beloved brother poet, Frank O. Ticknor, and as I read it I thought the sympathetic artist had unconsciously drawn in it a picture of himself. The best biography of Col. Hayne that has been or is likely to be written, is the poet's "Life of Henry Timrod." That essay is one of the most beautiful and sympathetic in the language, for in portraying the poetic nature of Timrod, we see the tender, luminous and inspired soul of Hayne himself by reflection, the same as we see the lovely spirit of Robert Southey in the "Life of Cowper." Would you know the inner heart of Hayne, read his "Life of Henry Timrod."

We first met Col. Hayne in Boston, after the war had ruined his fortune, and destroyed his health. It was some years before his death, but the fever of consumption was already kindling and renewing its fires. He had been to the White Hills, N. H., for his health, and his heart had been greatly elated while there amid the tonic air, but only to be depressed again by a hemorrhage on Lake Winnipisiogee. I well recall his fine intellectual and spiritual face, his officer-like bearing, his wonderful talk, his aspirations, and the expression of his sensitive sou in verse that flowed almost daily from his pen; his visit to Whittier, and his views of religious things which he unfolded to me on a Sunday walk to Trinity church. To have met him at that time was to cherish a most wonderful memory; sickness had mellowed his spirit, and brought to it an almost celestial light; his thoughts had the tinge of the future, and the passing clouds were celestial chariots. The last time that I met him, was at his cottage home at Copse Hill, Georgia, a few months before his death. It was a March evening, and he had recently sent to Harper's Magazine his last representative poem, "Face to Face." The fevers of consumption had long burned, and they had now nearly changed to ashes the fuel of life.

me privately that he would soon die, and said that only for the sake of his beloved wife and son he would be in a hurry to go. His Christian faith lifted him, and he felt no fear. He desired to read to me his poem "Face to Face." "I wish the world to know," he said, "that this is my view of death, as a dying man." His careful wife feared that it might be too much for his strength for him to read the poem aloud. But he insisted upon doing it. I can see him now as he stood that evening before the blazing logs of the open fire, and read that wonderful and beautiful soul analysis, a poem that ought to be forever quoted when one writes of him. If the last poems of the great poet should ever be collected, "Face to Face," would stand 'distinct among them all. It is a tender heroism, a beautiful spirituality, a brushing of the unimprisoned wing against the rays of the eternal morning. The effect of the reading injured him; he was not able to rise on the following morning.

Paul H. Hayne was born in Charleston, South Carolina, January 1st, 1830. His ancestors were distinguished both in England and in the colonial history of the Carolinas. The famous orator and statesman, Robert Y. Hayne, governor and United States Senator, was his uncle. He was graduated from Charleston College. He was a poet from youth. The Attic bees hummed about his cradle by the southern sea, and like Cowley, he "lisped in numbers." He was early brought under the influence of William Gilmore Simms, the novelist and poet, the Fenimore Cooper of the South.

There was a distinct literary period in Charleston at this time, as distinct as that of Boston in the early days of the Atlantic Monthly. Simms was the leader of it; Calhoun entered into it; Legaré, Timrod and Hayne were its principal members. The literary coterie established a magazine, and young Hayne was appointed the editor. So his literary life began, a life whose influence for good was destined to be felt in every American household.

His first volume of poems was published by the old house of Ticknor & Co., Boston, when he was twenty-five years of age. His poetry now began He told to enter into magazine literature, and collection Copyright, 1889, by CHARLES WELLS MOULTON, All rights reserved.

after collection was made. The war came. Col. Hayne became an aid of Gov. Pickens, and a member of his staff. During the bombardment of Charleston, his beautiful home and its valuable library were destroyed. The war left poor the long enriched, family. Col. Hayne's health began to be seriously impaired, and he built him a cottage in the seclusion of the pine barrens at Copse Hill, near Augusta, Ga., at Groveton, where the work of his last years was done.

Col. Hayne was blessed with a true, noble and sympathetic wife, who was the heart of his life, and who entered into all of his work with clear judgment and appreciative sympathy. Her maiden name was Mary Middleton Michel, a name well known among the most honored families of the South. She was the daughter of a French Huguenot, who rendered distinguished services as a physician to the French army under Napoleon. She still lives at Copse Hill, Ga. She is a clear-sighted but generous critic of the literature of the times, especially of poetry. She will ever be beloved by the public for what she was to the poet in both his prosperity and in the days of his altered fortune. Col. Hayne's only son, the well known poet William H. Hayne, who inherits his father's insights of nature and culture in art, lives with his mother at Copse Hill.

Paul H. Hayne is the representative poet of the South, the Longfellow of the new land of literary inspiration and art. He will always hold this place among the poets of the past. He thoroughly believed in the divine callings of the poet, and that the true poet was the voice of the seer crying in the wilderness of the world. He held the calling to be the highest among men. He saw nature

and the soul with a prophet's eyes, and his heart went out to humanity, and he wrote to make the whole world better and to add to its happiness and hope. His works are pure and Christian. They express what the South once was. They voice and picture the Carolinas of the past. The son of the poet sees a new age, and stands at the door of a new era. May Heaven long bless the cottage home at Copse Hill. H. B.

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"Too late!" through God's infinite world,

From his throne to life's nethermost fires,
"Too late!" is a phantom that flies at the dawn
Of the soul that repents and aspires.
If pure thou hast made thy desires,

There's no height the strong wings of immortals may gain

Which in striving to reach thou shalt strive for in vain.

Then, up to the contest with fate,

Unbound by the past, which is dead!

What though the heart's roses are ashes and dust?
What though the heart's music be fled?
Still shine the fair heavens o'erhead;

And sublime as the seraph who rules in the sun
Beams the promise of joy when the conflict is won!

CHOICE AND CHANGE.

THREE maidens at a fair, one day,

Chose each a flower from out the same boquet. '
One chose a violet; “May my life," said she,
"Like this sweet flower's, be passed in privacy!"
Another — a glad Hebe — deftly chose
From the rare cluster an imperial rose:-
"May life for me," she said, "through all its hours,
Be bright like thine, thou empress of the flowers!"
A third the lily chose. "I mark in thee,
Passion," she whispered, wed to purity."

The maiden shy who fain had dwelt apart,
Led Fashion's Queen--though with aching heart.
She, whose warm soul the yearning hope did crave
A bliss, rich, rose-like,-filled an early grave!
While she who loved the lily,-hapless maid!-
Perished forlorn,-- dishonored and betrayed!

PRE-EXISTENCE.

WHILE sauntering through the crowded street Some half-remembered face I meet,

Albeit upon no mortal shore

That face, methinks, hath smiled before.
Lost in a gay and festal throng,

I tremble at some tender song
Set to an air whose golden bars

I must have heard in other stars.

In sacred aisles I pause to share
The blessings of a priestly prayer-

When the whole scene which greets mine eyes
In some strange mode I recognize

As one whose every mystic part

I feel prefigured in my heart.
At sunset, as I calmly stand,
A stranger on an alien strand —
Familiar as my childhood's home

Seems the long stretch of wave and foam.
One sails toward me, o'er the bay,
And what he comes to do and say

I can foretell. A prescient lore
Springs from some life outlived of yore.
O swift, instinctive, startling gleams
Of deep soul-knowledge! not as dreams
For aye ye vaguely dawn and die,
But oft with lightning certainty
Pierce through the dark, oblivious brain,
To make old thoughts and memories plain-
Thoughts which perchance must travel back
Across the wild, bewildering track
Of countless æons; memories far,
High-reaching as yon pallid star,
Unknown, scarce seen, whose flickering grace
Faints on the outmost rings of space!

LOVE'S AUTUMN.
(To My Wife.)

I WOULD not lose a single silvery ray

Of those white locks which like a milky way
Streak the dusk midnight of thy raven hair;

I would not lose, O sweet! the misty shine
Of those half-saddened, thoughtful eyes of thine,
Whence Love looks forth, touched by the shadow

of care;

I would not miss the droop of thy dear mouth, The lips less dewy-red than when the South,— The young South wind of passion sighed o'er them;

I would not miss each delicate flower that blows On thy wan cheeks, soft as September's rose Blushing but faintly on its faltering stem;

I would not miss the air of chastened grace Which breathed divinely from thy patient face, Tells of love's watchful anguish, merged in rest;

Naught would I miss of all thou hast, or art,
O! friend supreme, whose constant, stainless heart,
Doth house unknowing, many an angel guest;

Their presence keeps thy spiritual chambers pure; While the flesh fails, strong love grows more and

more

Divinely beautiful with perished years;

Thus, at each slow, but surely deepening sign
Of life's decay, we will not, Sweet! repine,
Nor greet its mellowing close with thankless tears;

Love's spring was fair, love's summer brave and bland,

But through love's autumn mist I view the land, The land of deathless summers yet to be;

There, I behold thee, young again and bright,
In a great flood of rare transfiguring light,
But there as here, thou smilest, Love! on me!

IN THE WHEAT-FIELD.

WHEN the lids of the virgin Dawn unclose,
When the earth is fair and the heavens are calm,
And the early breath of the wakening rose
Floats on the air in balm,

I stand breast-high in the pearly wheat
That ripples and thrills to a sportive breeze
Borne over the field with its Hermes feet,
And its subtle odor of Southern seas;
While out of the infinite azure deep
The flashing wings of the swallows sweep,
Buoyant and beautiful, wild and fleet,
Over the waves of the whispering wheat.

Aurora faints in the fulgent fire

Of the Monarch of Morning's bright embrace, And the summer day climbs higher and higher Up the cerulean space;

The pearl-tints fade from the radiant grain,
And the sportive breeze of the ocean dies,
And soon in the noontide's soundless rain

The field seems graced by a million eyes; Each grain with a glance from its lidded fold, As bright as a gnome's in his mine of gold, While the slumbrous glamor of beam and heat Glides over and under the windless wheat.

Yet the languid spirit of lazy Noon,

With its minor and Morphean music rife,
Is pulsing in low, voluptuous tune
With summer's lust of life.

Hark! to the droning of drowsy wings,

To the honey-bees as they go and come, To the "boomer" scarce rounding his sultry rings, The gnat's small horn, and the beetle's hum; And hark to the locust!- Noon's one shrill song, Like the tingling steel of an elfin gong, Grows lower through quavers of long retreat To swoon on the dazzled and distant wheat.

Now Day declines! and his shafts of might
Are sheathed in a quiver of opal haze;
Still through the chastened, but magic light,
What sunset grandeurs blaze!
For the sky, in its mellowed lustre, seems
Like the realm of a master poet's mind-
A shifting kingdom of splendid dreams-
With fuller and fairer truths behind;
And the changeful colors that blend or part
Ebb like the tides of a living heart,
And the splendor melts and the shadows meet,
And the tresses of Twilight trail over the wheat.

Thus Eve creeps slowly and shyly down,

And the gurgling notes of the swallows cease,
They flicker aloft through the foliage brown,
In the ancient vesper peace;

But a step like the step of a conscious fawn
Is stealing with many a pause ·
this way,
Till the hand of my love through mine is drawn,
Her heart on mine in the tender ray;

O hand of the lily, O heart of truth,

O love, thou art faithful and fond as Ruth;

But I am the gleaner - of kisses - Sweet,
While the starlight dawns on the dimpling wheat!

A COMPARISON.

I THINK, oftimes, that lives of men may be
Likened to wandering winds that come and go,
Not knowing whence they rise, whither they blow
O'er the vast globe, voiceful of grief or glee.
Some lives are buoyant zephyrs sporting free
In tropic sunshine; some long winds of woe
That shun the day, wailing with murmurs low,
Through haunted twilights, by the unresting sea;
Others are ruthless, stormful, drunk with might,
Born of deep passion or malign desire:
They rave 'mid thunder-peals and clouds of fire.
Wild, reckless all, save that some power unknown
Guides each blind force till life be overblown,
Lost in vague hollows of the fathomless night.

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