e, 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,