He is a skilled
craftsman, his ear is finely attuned to harmonious arrangements of sounds,
and he shows an acquaintance with the best melodists in English poetry. The
limpid ease and grace in his lines may be judged by this dainty poem:--
"A tiny rift within the lute
May sometimes make the music mute!
By slow degrees, the rift grows wide,
By slow degrees, the tender tide--
Harmonious once--of loving thought
Becomes with harsher measures fraught,
Until the heart's Arcadian breath
Lapses thro' discord into death!"
His best poems are nature lyrics. In _The Woodland Phases_, one of the
finest of these, he tells how nature is to him a revelation of the
divine:--
"And midway, betwixt heaven and us,
Stands Nature in her fadeless grace,
Still pointing to our Father's house,
His glory on her mystic face."
Hayne found the inspiration for his verse in the scenes about his forest
home: in the "fairy South Wind" that "floateth on the subtle wings of
balm," in
"... the one small glimmering rill
That twinkles like a wood-fay's mirthful eye,"
in the solitary lake
"Shrined in the woodland's secret heart,"
in
"His blasted pines, smit by the fiery West,
Uptowering rank on rank, like Titan spears,"
in the storm among the Georgian hills, in the twilight, that
".
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