Two small volumes of Hayne's poetry appeared before the Civil War from the press of Ticknor & Co., Boston. They were made up chiefly of pieces contributed to the Southern Literary Messenger, Russsell's Magazine, and other periodicals in the South. The first volume appeared in 1855, and the second in 1859. These volumes were well worthy of the favorable reception they met with, and encouraged the poet to dedicate himself more fully to his art. In the fullness of this dedication, he reminds us of Longfellow, Tennyson, and Wordsworth, all of whom he admired and loved.
Few first volumes of greater excellence have ever appeared in this country. The judicious critic was at once able to recognize the presence of a genuine singer. The poet rises above the obvious imitation that was a common vice among Southern singers before the Civil War. We may indeed perceive the influence of Tennyson in the delicacy of the craftsmanship, and the influence of Wordsworth in the deep and sympathetic treatment of Nature; but Hayne's study of these great bards had been transmuted into poetic culture, and is reflected only in the superior quality of his work. There is no case of conscious or obvious imitation.
The volume of 1859, which bears the title Avolio and Other Poems, exhibits the poet's fondness for the sonnet and his admirable skill in its use. Throughout his subsequent poetical career, he frequently chose the sonnet as the medium for expressing his choicest thought. It is hardly too much to claim that Hayne is the prince of American sonneteers. The late Maurice Thompson said that he could pick out twenty of Hayne's sonnets equal to almost any others in our language. In the following sonnet, which is quoted by way of illustration, the poet gives us the key to a large part of his work. He was a worshiper of beauty; and the singleness of this devotion gives him his distinctive place in our poetic annals.
"Pent in this common sphere of sensual shows,
I pine for beauty; beauty of fresh mien,
And gentle utterance, and the charm serene,
Wherewith the hue of mystic dreamland glows;
I pine for lulling music, the repose
Of low-voiced waters, in some realm between
The perfect Adenne, and this clouded scene
Of love's sad loss, and passion's mournful throes;
A pleasant country, girt with twilight calm,
In whose fair heaven a moon of shadowy round
Wades through a fading fall of sunset rain;
Where drooping lotos-flowers, distilling balm,
Gleam by the drowsy streamlets sleep hath crown'd,
While Care forgets to sigh, and Peace hath balsamed pain."
The great civil conflict of '61-'65 naturally stirred the poet's heart. He was a patriotic son of the South. On the breaking out of hostilities, he became a member of Governor Pickens's staff, and was stationed for a time in Fort Sumter; but after a brief service he was forced to resign on account of failing health. His principal service to the Southern cause was rendered in his martial songs, which breathe a lofty, patriotic spirit. They are remarkable at once for their dignity of manner and refinement of utterance. There is an entire absence of the fierceness that is to be found in some of Whittier's and Timrod's sectional lyrics. Hayne lacked the fierce energy of a great reformer or partisan leader. But nowhere else do we find a heart more sensitive to grandeur of achievement or pathos of incident. He recognized the unsurpassed heroism of sentiment and achievement displayed in the war; and in an admirable sonnet, he exclaims:—
"Ah, foolish souls and false! who loudly cried
'True chivalry no longer breathes in time.'
Look round us now; how wondrous, how sublime
The heroic lives we witness; far and wide
Stern vows by sterner deeds are justified;
Self-abnegation, calmness, courage, power,
Sway, with a rule august, our stormy hour,
Wherein the loftiest hearts have wrought and died—
Wrought grandly, and died smiling. Thus, O God,
From tears, and blood, and anguish, thou hast brought
The ennobling act, the faith-sustaining thought—
Till, in the marvelous present, one may see
A mighty stage, by knights and patriots trod,
Who had not shunned earth's haughtiest chivalry."
The war brought the poet disaster. His beautiful home and the library he has celebrated in a noble sonnet were destroyed in the bombardment of Charleston. The family silver, which had been stored in Columbia for safe-keeping, was lost in Sherman's famous "march to the sea." His native state was in desolation; his friends, warm and true with the fidelity which a common disaster brings, were generally as destitute and helpless as himself. Under these disheartening circumstances, rendered still more gloomy by the ruthless deeds of reconstruction, he withdrew to the pine barrens of Georgia, where, eighteen miles from Augusta, he built a very plain and humble cottage. He christened it Copse Hill; and it was here, on a desk fashioned out of a workbench left by the carpenters, that many of his choicest pieces, reflecting credit on American letters, and earning for him a high place among American poets, were written.
This modest home, which from its steep hillside—
"Catches morn's earliest and eve's latest glow,"—
the poet has commemorated in a sonnet, which gives us a glimpse of the quiet, rural scenes that were dear to his heart:—