In May, 1864, Simms was in Columbia, and on his return to “Woodlands” wrote to Hayne that Timrod was in better health and spirits than for years, saying:  “He has only to prepare a couple of dwarf essays, making a single column, and the pleasant public is satisfied.  These he does so well that they have reason to be so.  Briefly, our friend is in a fair way to fatten and be happy.”

This prosperity came to an end when the capital city fell a victim to the fires of war, and Timrod returned to the city of his birth, where for a time the publication of the South Carolinian was continued, he writing editorials nominally for fifteen dollars a month, practically for exercise in facile expression, as the small stipend promised was never paid.  With the paper, he soon returned to Columbia, where after a time he secured work in the office of Governor Orr, writing to Hayne that twice he copied papers from ten o’clock one morning till sunrise of the next.

With the close of the session, his work ended, and in the spring he visited Paul Hayne at Copse Hill.  Hayne says:  “He found me with my family established in a crazy wooden shanty, dignified as a cottage, near the track of the main Georgia railroad, about sixteen miles from Augusta.”  To Timrod, that “crazy wooden shanty,” set in immemorial pines and made radiant by the presence of his poet friend, was finer than a palace.  On that “windy, frowzy, barren hill,” as Maurice Thompson called it, the two old friends spent together the spring days of ’67—­such days as lingered in golden beauty in the memory of one of them and have come down to us in immortal verse.

Again in August of that year he visited Copse Hill, hoping to find health among the pines.  Of these last days Paul Hayne wrote years later: 

    In the latter summer-tide of this same year I again persuaded him
    to visit me.  Ah! how sacred now, how sad and sweet, are the memories
    of that rich, clear, prodigal August of ’67!

We would rest on the hillsides, in the swaying golden shadows, watching together the Titanic masses of snow-white clouds which floated slowly and vaguely through the sky, suggesting by their form, whiteness, and serene motion, despite the season, flotillas of icebergs upon Arctic seas.  Like lazzaroni we basked in the quiet noons, sunk into the depths of reverie, or perhaps of yet more “charmed sleep.”  Or we smoked, conversing lazily between the puffs,

      “Next to some pine whose antique roots just peeped
      From out the crumbling bases of the sand.”

    But the evenings, with their gorgeous sunsets, “rolling down like
    a chorus” and the “gray-eyed melancholy gloaming,” were the
    favorite hours of the day with him.

One of those pines was especially his own, by his love and his choice of its shade as a resting place.  Of it Paul Hayne wrote when his friend had passed from its shadows for the last time: