TO COLONEL JOHN G. JAMES, PRESIDENT OF THE STATE AGRICULTURAL AND MECHANICAL COLLEGE OF TEXAS, These Verses, IN WHICH HE HAS TAKEN SO UNSELFISH AN INTEREST, ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED.

IT had little to do with Byron's success as a poet that he was born in the purple of the English aristocracy; or with the quality of Shelley's genius that he was the son of a Sir Timothy, who prided himself on a descent from a long line of British squires; or that Algernon Swinburne's father was a baronet. And yet if our poets have gentle blood in their veins, other things being equal, we prefer that they should have it.

Good birth, as a general thing, argues good breeding, refinement, education, fixed social position, and a wide margin of generous leisures; all of which have much to do with the outcome of a poet's life.

We do not believe that Tennyson would ever have written as he has, if it had been his fortune to labor for his daily bread. Even had the genius all been there, the wide leisures would have been wanting, and he would have produced his poems, not as Goethe, at his “unhasting ease,”—absolutely free from all exigence—but under the pressure of a goad, which would have destroyed all their beautiful spontaneity.

It is therefore to the advantage of our poet, PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE, that he had ancestors. It may sound somewhat unrepublican perhaps, to hear him wish, as he does in one of his keen sonnets, that these same ancestors had been content to stay in their four-hundred-year-old Shropshire Manor-House, enjoying the positive good England gave them, rather than go sailing over seas in quest of what might be of questionable benefit; but we can forgive him, in view of his antecedents on this side the water, of which he may be proud as well. His English progenitors settled, early in colonial days, in Charleston, South Carolina, and from the first were of importance in the civil affairs of the young State. They furnished noble patriots, who shed their blood in Revolutionary days, for the liberties of their adopted country. The name of the renowned statesman and orator, Robert G. Hayne, who was the poet's uncle, has become the possession of the country. While in the Senate of the United States, he was not afraid to match his strength with Webster's, and he was governor of South Carolina when to be governor of the Palmetto State was an honor worth the winning.

The subject of this sketch is the only child of Lieutenant Hayne, a naval officer, who died at sea when his son was an infant; his mother, recently deceased, was a South Carolina lady, of good English and Scotch descent. He was born in Charleston, January 1st, 1830, and educated at Charleston College, from which he was graduated. Inheriting the prestige of a noble name, high position, and a sufficient amount of wealth, the world was before the youth, and he was free to choose his path. From earliest boyhood his fondness for literature, particularly poetry, was pronounced, and there was everything around him to foster this love. The Charleston of thirty-five years ago was a very different place from the Charleston of to-day. The old Huguenot element, with its aristocratic names and associations, was strong, and the large admixture of good English blood helped to make its people just a little exclusive. Boston herself did not gather the mantle of her self-importance in a more queenly manner about her than did this city by the sea. There was a decided literary element, too, among its higher classes. Legarè's wit and scholarship brightened its social circle; Calhoun's deep shadow loomed over it from his plantation at Fort Hill; Gilmore Simms's genial culture broadened its sympathies. The latter was the Macænas to a band of brilliant youths who used to meet for literary suppers at his beautiful home; and here it was that the love for old Elizabethan lore, and the study of the classics of the English tongue, which has always characterized Mr. Hayne, found one of its best stimulants.

No sooner had he graduated than he threw himself actively into literary life. He became connected with the journalism of the city, and when the enthusiastic group of young scholars established a Literary Monthly Magazine (Russell's) Mr. Hayne was appointed its editor.

His first volume of Poems was published by the old house of Ticknor & Co., Boston, in 1855, when he was some twenty-five years old, his second in 1857, and his third in 1860. These all met with such success as encouraged him to adopt fully a literary life as his vocation. In the meantime he had married Miss Mary Middleton Michel, of Charleston, the daughter of in eminent French physician, who received a gold medal from Napoleon the Third, for services under the first Napoleon at the battle of Leipsic. Of the poet's wife it is but the scantest justice to say that she has been the inspiration, the stay, the joy of his life. No poet ever was more blessed in a wife, and she it is, who, by her self-renunciation, her exquisite sympathy, her positive, material help, her bright hopefulness, has made endurable the losses and trials that have crowded Mr. Hayne's life. Those who know how to read between the lines can see everywhere the influence of this irradiating and stimulating presence.

Then came the disasters of the civil war. Mr. Hayne, whose health, delicate from his childhood, would not allow him to take field service, became an aid on Governor Pickens's staff. During the bombardment of his native city, his beautiful home was burned to the ground, and his large, handsome library utterly lost. Even the few valuables, such as the old family silver, which he succeeded in securing and removing to a bank in Columbia for safe-keeping, were swept away in the famous “march to the sea;” and there was nothing left for the homeless and ruined man but exile among the “Pine Barrens” of Georgia. There he established himself, in utter seclusion, in a veritable cottage (or rather shanty, dignified at first as “Hayne's Roost”), behind whose screens of vines, among the peaches, melons, and strawberries of his own raising, he has fought the fight of life with uncomplaining bravery, and persisted in being happy.

Here, then, at “Copse Hill,” nested amid his greenery and his pines, our poet has lived for fifteen years,—content with little of this world's gear, happy in his chosen work, writing as his frail health would permit, and in manly independence. In 1872, the Lippincotts published his Legends and Lyrics, and in 1873 his edition of his friend Henry Timrod's Poems appeared, accompanied by one of the most pathetic biographical memorials of which literature gives an example. In 1875, The Mountain of the Lovers was published. A Life of Gilmore Simms (still in MS.) was also written, with Memorial Sketches of Governor Hayne and Mr. Legarè,—so that these years of seclusion have been well filled up with literary labor; and during the past five years the names of not many writers have appeared more frequently, perhaps, in the pages of our current literature, than that of the recluse of “Copse Hill.” Here he has interpreted Nature, we think, with as clear an insight as the poet of Rydal Mount. He has made the melancholy moanings of his Georgia pines sob through his verses. He has given voices to the Midnight Thunder; to the Windless Rain; to the Muscadines of the Southern Forests; to their Woodland Phases; to the Aspects of the Pines, as has not been heretofore done.

It were superfluous to enter upon any criticism of his poems, nor is this the place for it. They are left with the reader, who, if he cannot, of himself, find therein the aromatic freshness of the woods,—the swaying incense of the cathedral-like aisles of pines,—the sough of dying summer winds,—the glint of lonely pools, and the brooding notes of leaf-hidden mocking-birds,—would not be able to discern them, however carefully the critic might point them out.