This is my world! within these narrow walls
      I own a princely service

was perhaps as remarkable a room as any in which student ever spent his working hours, the walls being papered wholly with cuts from papers and periodicals.  The furniture was decorated in the same way, even to the writing desk, which was an old work bench left by some carpenters.  All had been done by the “bonny brown hands” that never wearied in loving service.

Many of his friends made pilgrimages to the little cottage on the hill, where they were cordially welcomed by the poet, who, happy in his home with his wife and little son, lived among the flowers which he tended with his own hands, surrounded by the majesty of the pines whose

    Passion and mystery murmur through the leaves,—­
      Passion and mystery touched by deathless pain,
    Whose monotone of long, low anguish grieves
      For something lost that shall not live again.

Hither came Henry Timrod, doomed to failure, loss, and early death, but with soul eternally alive with the fires of genius.  In the last days of his sad and broken life William Gilmore Simms came to renew old memories and recount the days when life in old Charleston was iridescent as the waves that washed the feet of the Queen of the Sea.  Congenial spirits they were who met in that charming little study where Paul Hayne walked “the fields of quiet Arcadies” and

    ... gleamings of the lost, heroic life
    Flashed through the gorgeous vistas of romance.

Hayne had the subtle power of touching the friendliness in the hearts of those who were far away, as well as of the comrades who had walked with him along the road of life.  Often letters came from friends in other lands, known to him only by that wireless intuitional telegraphy whereby kindred souls know each other, though hands have not met nor eyes looked into eyes.  Many might voice the thought expressed by one:  “I may boast that Paul Hayne was my friend, though it was never my good fortune to meet him.”  Many a soul was upheld and strengthened by him, as was that of a man who wrote that he had been saved from suicide by reading the “Lyric of Action.”  His album held autographed photographs of many writers, among them Charles Kingsley, William Black, and Wilkie Collins.  He cherished an ivy vine sent him by Blackmore from Westminister Abbey.

Hayne’s many-windowed mind looked out upon all the phases of the beauty of Nature.  Her varied moods found in him a loving response.  He awaited her coming as the devotee at the temple gate waits for the approach of his Divinity: 

    I felt, through dim, awe-laden space,
    The coming of thy veiled face;
      And in the fragrant night’s eclipse
      The kisses of thy deathless lips,
    Like strange star-pulses, throbbed through space!

Whether it is drear November and

    But winds foreboding fill the desolate night
    And die at dawning down wild woodland ways,