PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE, 1830-1886
[Illustration: PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE]
Paul Hamilton Hayne was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1830. His
family was rich and influential, and he inherited a fortune in his own
right. After graduating at Charleston College, he studied law, but devoted
his independent leisure entirely to literature. He became associated with
_The Southern Literary Gazette_, and was the first editor of _Russell's
Magazine_, an ambitious venture launched by the literary circle at the
house of Simms. Hayne married happily, and had every prospect of a
prosperous and brilliant career when the war broke out. He enlisted, but
his health soon failed, and at the close of the war he found himself an
invalid with his fortune destroyed. He went to the Pine Barrens of Georgia,
where he built, on land which he named Copse Hill, a hut nearly as rude as
Thoreau's at Walden. Handicapped by poverty and disease, Hayne lived here
during the remainder of his life, writing his best poems on a desk
fashioned out of a workbench. He died in 1886.
Hayne wrote a large amount of poetry, and tried many forms of verse, in
almost all of which he maintained a smoothness of meter, a correctness of
rhyme, and, in general, a high level of artistic finish.
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