ter:

In the latter summer-tide of this same year I again persuaded him
to visit me. Ah! how sacred now, how sad and sweet, are the memories
of that rich, clear, prodigal August of '67!

We would rest on the hillsides, in the swaying golden shadows,
watching together the Titanic masses of snow-white clouds which
floated slowly and vaguely through the sky, suggesting by their
form, whiteness, and serene motion, despite the season, flotillas
of icebergs upon Arctic seas. Like lazzaroni we basked in the
quiet noons, sunk into the depths of reverie, or perhaps of yet
more "charmed sleep." Or we smoked, conversing lazily between the
puffs,

"Next to some pine whose antique roots just peeped
From out the crumbling bases of the sand."

But the evenings, with their gorgeous sunsets, "rolling down like
a chorus" and the "gray-eyed melancholy gloaming," were the
favorite hours of the day with him.

One of those pines was especially his own, by his love and his choice
of its shade as a resting place. Of it Paul Hayne wrote when his
friend had passed from its shadows for the last time:

The same majestic pine is lifted high
Against the twilight sky,
The same low, melancholy music grieves
Amid the topmost leaves,
As when I watched and mused and dreamed with him
Beneath those shadows dim.

Such dreams we can dimly imagine sometimes when we stand beneath a
glorious pine and try to translate its whisperings into words, and
watch "the last rays of sunset shimmering down, flashed like a royal
crown." Sometimes we catch glimpses of such radiant visions when we
stand in the pine shadows and think, as Hayne did so often after that
beautiful August, "Of one who comes no more." Under that stately tree
he

Seemed to drink the sunset like strong wine
Or, hushed in trance divine,
Hailed the first shy and timorous glance from far
Of evening's virgin star.

In all his years after, Paul Hayne held in his heart the picture of
his friend with head against that "mighty trunk" when

The unquiet passion died from out his eyes,
As lightning from stilled skies.

So through that glowing August on Copse Hill the two Southern poets
walked and talked and built their shrine to the shining Olympic
goddess to whom their lives were dedicated.

When summer had wrapped about her the purple and crimson glories of
her bri