He says in _A Vision of Poesy_ that the poet's mission is to "... turn life's tasteless waters into wine, And flush them through and through with purple tints." His best known and most original poem is _The Cotton Boll_. This description of the wide stretches of a white cotton field is one of the best in the poem. He shows the field "... lost afar Behind the crimson hills and purple lawns Of sunset, among plains which roll their streams Against the Evening Star! And lo! To the remotest point of sight, Although I gaze upon no waste of snow, The endless field is white; And the whole landscape glows, For many a shining league away, With such accumulated light As Polar lands would flash beneath a tropic day!" Simplicity and sincerity in language, theme, and feeling are special characteristics of Timrod's verse. His lyrics are short and their volume slight, but a few of them, like _Spring_ and _The Lily Confidante_, seem almost to have sung themselves. So vivid is his reproduction of the spirit of the awakening year in his poem _Spring_, that, to quote his own lines:-- "... you scarce would start, If from a beech's heart, A blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say, 'Behold me! I am May.'" Timrod shows the same qualities of simplicity, directness, and genuine feeling in his war poetry. No more ringing lines were written for the southern cause during the Civil War than are to be found in his poems, _Carolina_ and _Ethnogenesis_. PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE, 1830-1886 [Illustration: PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE] Paul Hamilton Hayne was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1830. His family was rich and influential, and he inherited a fortune in his own right. After graduating at Charleston College, he studied law, but devoted his independent leisure entirely to literature. He became associated with _The Southern Literary Gazette_, and was the first editor of _Russell's Magazine_, an ambitious venture launched by the literary circle at the house of Simms. Hayne married happily, and had every prospect of a prosperous and brilliant career when the war broke out. He enlisted, but his health soon failed, and at the close of the war he found himself an invalid with his fortune destroyed. He went to the Pine Barrens of Georgia, where he built, on land which he named Copse Hill, a hut nearly as rude as Thoreau's at Walden. Handicapped by poverty and disease, Hayne lived here during the remainder of his life, writing his best poems on a desk fashioned out of a workbench. He died in 1886.