the olden time, Lancaster and York and the sweet pink cinnamon,
breathed the fragrance of days long past. The hills that environed her
were snowy with Cherokee roses and odorous with jasmine and
honeysuckle. Her people dwelt in mansions in the corridors of which
ancestral ghosts from Colonial days kept guard.

In old Charleston that goes back in history almost a century before
the Revolution and extends to the opening of the Sixties--the old
Queen City by the Sea, which now few are left to remember--was a
circle of congenial creative souls just before the first shot at Fort
Sumter heralded the destruction of the old-time life of the Colonial
city. William Gilmore Simms was the head and mentor of the brilliant
little band, and the much younger men, Paul Hamilton Hayne and Henry
Timrod, were the fiery souls that gave it the mental electricity
necessary to furnish the motive power. Through all the coming days of
trial and hardship, of aspiration and defeat, of watching from the
towers of high achievement or lying prone in the valley of failure,
not one of that little circle ever lost the golden memory of those
magic evenings in the home of the novelist and poet, the thinker and
dreamer, William Gilmore Simms, the intellectual father of them all.

At that time in the old city was another picturesque home that harked
back to Colonial days--stately, veranda-circled, surrounded by that
fascinating atmosphere of history and poetry known to those old
dwellings alone of all the structures of the New World: the home of
the Southern poet of Nature, Paul Hamilton Hayne. Its many-windowed
front looked cheerfully out upon a wide lawn radiant with flowers of
bygone fashion, loved by the poets of olden times, and bright with the
greenery that kept perpetual summer around the historic dwelling. This
beautiful pre-Revolutionary home was burned in the bombardment of