still

      Love limned his wavering likeness on my soul,
      Till through slow growths it waxed a perfect whole
    Of clear conceptions, brightening heart and mind.

That clear conception remained a lifelong treasure in the poet’s heart.

Through a great ancestral corridor had Paul Hamilton Hayne descended, with soul enjewelled with all the gems of character and thought that had sparkled in the long gallery through which he had travelled into the earth-light.

In the school of Mr. Coates, in Charleston, he was fitted to enter Charleston College, a plain, narrow-fronted structure with six severely classic columns supporting the facade.  It stood on the foundation of the “old brick barracks” held by the Colonial troops through a six-weeks siege by twelve thousand British regulars under Sir Henry Clinton.

Hayne satisfied the hunger and thirst of his excursive and ardent mind by browsing in the Charleston Library on Broad and Church streets.  It may be that sometimes, on his way to that friendly resort, he passed the old house on Church Street which once sheltered General Washington; a substantial three-storied building with ornamental woodwork which might cause its later use as a bakery to seem out of harmony to any but chefs with high ideals of their art.

The Library of old Charleston was composed chiefly of English classics and the literature of France in the olden time when Europe furnished us with something more than anarchy, clothes, and bargain-counter titles.  A sample of the Young America of that early day asked an old gentleman, “Why are you always reading that old Montaigne?” The reply was, “Why, child, there is in this book all that a gentleman needs to think about,” with the discreet addition, “Not a book for little girls, though.”  If we find in our circle of poets a certain stateliness of style scarcely to be looked for in a somewhat new republic that might be expected to rush pell-mell after an idea and capture it by the sudden impact of a lusty blow, after the manner of the minute-men catching a red-coat at Lexington; if we observe in their writing old world expressions that woo us subtly, like the odor of lavender from a long-closed linen chest, we may attribute it to the fact that aristocratic old Charleston, though the first to assert her independence of the political yoke, yet clung tenaciously to the literary ideals of the Old World.

On Meeting Street was Apprentices’ Library Hall, where Glidden led his hearers through the intricacies of Egyptian Archaeology.  Here Agassiz sometimes lectured on Zooelogy, and our youthful poet may have watched animals from the jungle climb up the blackboard at the touch of what would have been only a piece of chalk in any other hand, but became a magic creative force under the guidance of that wizard of science.  Here he could have followed with Thackeray the varying fortunes and ethic vagaries of the royal Georges.