boast that Paul Hayne was my friend, though it was never my
good fortune to meet him." Many a soul was upheld and strengthened by
him, as was that of a man who wrote that he had been saved from
suicide by reading the "Lyric of Action." His album held autographed
photographs of many writers, among them Charles Kingsley, William
Black, and Wilkie Collins. He cherished an ivy vine sent him by
Blackmore from Westminister Abbey.

Hayne's many-windowed mind looked out upon all the phases of the
beauty of Nature. Her varied moods found in him a loving response. He
awaited her coming as the devotee at the temple gate waits for the
approach of his Divinity:

I felt, through dim, awe-laden space,
The coming of thy veiled face;
And in the fragrant night's eclipse
The kisses of thy deathless lips,
Like strange star-pulses, throbbed through space!

Whether it is drear November and

But winds foreboding fill the desolate night
And die at dawning down wild woodland ways,

or in May "couched in cool shadow" he hears

The bee-throngs murmurous in the golden fern,
The wood-doves veiled by depths of flickering green,

for him the music of the spheres is in it all. Whether at midnight

The moon, a ghost of her sweet self,

* * * * *

Creeps up the gray, funereal sky wearily, how wearily,

or morning comes "with gracious breath of sunlight," it is a part of
glorious Nature, his star-crowned Queen, his sun-clad goddess.

To no other heart has the pine forest come so near unfolding its
immemorial secret. That poet-mind was a wind-harp, and its quivering
strings echoed to every message that came from the dim old woods on
the "soft whispers of the twilight breeze," the flutterings of the
newly awakened morn or the crash of the storm. "The Dryad of the Pine"
bent "earth-yearning branches" to give him loving greeting and receive
his quick response:

Leaning on thee, I feel the subtlest thrill
Stir thy dusk limbs, tho' all the heavens are still,
And 'neath thy rings of rugged fretwork mark
What seems a heart-throb muffled in the dark.

"The imprisoned spirits of all winds that blow" echoed to his ear from
the heart of the pine-cone fallen from "the wavering height of yon
monarchal pine."

When a glorious pine, to him a living soul, falls under the axe he
hears "the wail of Dryads in their last distress."

In the greenery of