soon." One of the thousand, "Sunrise," he uttered
with a temperature of 104 degrees burning out his life, but it is full
of the rapture of the dawn.

To the pines of North Carolina the poet was taken, in the hope that
they might give him of their strength. But the wind-song through their
swaying branches lulled him to his last earthly sleep. On the 7th of
September the narrow stream of his earthly existence broadened and
deepened and flowed triumphantly into the great ocean of Eternal Life.

"THE POET OF THE PINES"

PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE

"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