"… lost afar
Behind the crimson hills and purple lawns
Of sunset, among plains which roll their streams
Against the Evening Star!
And lo!
To the remotest point of sight,
Although I gaze upon no waste of snow,
The endless field is white;
And the whole landscape glows,
For many a shining league away,
With such accumulated light
As Polar lands would flash beneath a tropic day!"
Simplicity and sincerity in language, theme, and feeling are special characteristics of Timrod's verse. His lyrics are short and their volume slight, but a few of them, like Spring and The Lily Confidante, seem almost to have sung themselves. So vivid is his reproduction of the spirit of the awakening year in his poem Spring, that, to quote his own lines:—
"… you scarce would start,
If from a beech's heart,
A blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say,
'Behold me! I am May.'"
Timrod shows the same qualities of simplicity, directness, and genuine feeling in his war poetry. No more ringing lines were written for the southern cause during the Civil War than are to be found in his poems, Carolina and Ethnogenesis.
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE, 1830-1886
[Illustration: PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE]
Paul Hamilton Hayne was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1830. His family was rich and influential, and he inherited a fortune in his own right. After graduating at Charleston College, he studied law, but devoted his independent leisure entirely to literature. He became associated with The Southern Literary Gazette, and was the first editor of Russell's Magazine, an ambitious venture launched by the literary circle at the house of Simms. Hayne married happily, and had every prospect of a prosperous and brilliant career when the war broke out. He enlisted, but his health soon failed, and at the close of the war he found himself an invalid with his fortune destroyed. He went to the Pine Barrens of Georgia, where he built, on land which he named Copse Hill, a hut nearly as rude as Thoreau's at Walden. Handicapped by poverty and disease, Hayne lived here during the remainder of his life, writing his best poems on a desk fashioned out of a workbench. He died in 1886.
Hayne wrote a large amount of poetry, and tried many forms of verse, in almost all of which he maintained a smoothness of meter, a correctness of rhyme, and, in general, a high level of artistic finish. He is a skilled craftsman, his ear is finely attuned to harmonious arrangements of sounds, and he shows an acquaintance with the best melodists in English poetry. The limpid ease and grace in his lines may be judged by this dainty poem:—
"A tiny rift within the lute
May sometimes make the music mute!
By slow degrees, the rift grows wide,
By slow degrees, the tender tide—
Harmonious once—of loving thought
Becomes with harsher measures fraught,
Until the heart's Arcadian breath
Lapses thro' discord into death!"
His best poems are nature lyrics. In The Woodland Phases, one of the finest of these, he tells how nature is to him a revelation of the divine:—