In this old home the Poet of the Pines was born of a family that looked back to the opening days of the eighteenth century, when Charleston was young, glowing with the beauty of her birth into the forests of the New World, wearing proudly the tiara of her loyalty to King and Crown.  Looking back along the road that stretched between the first Hayne, who helped to make of the old city a memory to be cherished on the page of history and a picture on the canvas of the present to awaken admiration, and the young soul that looked with poetic vision on the beginning of the new era, one sees a long succession of brilliant names and powerful figures.

Paul Hayne was the great-grand-nephew of “the Martyr Hayne,” who has given to Charleston her only authentic ghost-story, the scene of which was a brick dwelling which stood till 1896 at the corner of Atlantic and Meeting Streets.  Colonel Isaac H. Hayne, a soldier of the Revolution, secured a parole, that he might be with his dying wife.  While on parole he was ordered to fight against his country.  Rather than be forced to the crime of treason, he broke his parole, was captured and condemned to death.  From her beautiful, mahogany-panelled drawing-room in that old home where the two streets cross, his sister-in-law, who had gone with his two little children to plead for his life, watched as he passed on his way from the vault of the old Custom House, used then as a prison, to the gallows.  “Return, return to us!” she called in an agony of grief.  As he walked on he replied, “If I can I will.”  It is said that his old negro mammy, to whom he was always “my chile,” ran out to the gate with the playthings she had fondly cherished since the days when they were to him irresistible attractions, crying, “Come back!  Come back!” To both calls his heart responded with such longing love that when the soul was released, the old home knew the step and the voice again.  Ever afterward when eventide fell, one standing at that window would hear a ghostly voice from the street below and steps upon the stairs and in the hall; footsteps of one coming—­never going.

Paul Hamilton Hayne’s uncle, Colonel Arthur P. Hayne, fought under Jackson at New Orleans, and was afterward United States Senator.  Paul was nephew of Robert Y. Hayne, whose career as a statesman and an orator won for him a fame that has not faded with the years.  With this uncle, Paul found a home in his orphaned childhood.

Of his sailor father, Lieutenant Hayne, his shadowy memory takes form in a poem, one stanza of which gives us a view of the brave seaman’s life and death: 

    He perished not in conflict nor in flame,
      No laurel garland rests upon his tomb;
      Yet in stern duty’s path he met his doom;
    A life heroic, though unwed to fame.

Though he pathetically mourns: 

    Never in childhood have I blithely sprung
      To catch my father’s voice, or climb his knee,