He was much encouraged at this time by a sympathetic correspondence
with Paul Hamilton Hayne, who, after the Civil War, had settled
in a little cottage near Augusta. His beautiful home in Charleston
had been burned to the ground and his large, handsome library utterly lost.
With heroic spirit at a time when, as Lanier said of him,
"the war of secession had left the South in a condition which appeared
to render an exclusively literary life a hopeless impossibility,
he immured himself in the woods of Georgia and gave himself wholly
to his pen." When Simms visited him here in 1866, the poet had for supplies
"a box of hard tack, two sides of bacon, and fourscore, more or less,
of smoked herring, a frying-pan and a grid-iron." He and his wife
lived as simply as the Hawthornes did in the Old Manse. His writing desk
was a carpenter's work-bench. He wrote continually for the magazines,
corresponded with the poets of England and New England,
received visitors, with whom he talked about the old days in Charleston
when he and Timrod and Simms had projected "Russell's Magazine",
and held out to young Southern writers the encouragement of an older brother.
It was this man who, at a critical time in Lanier's life,
inspired him to believe that he might succeed in a literary career.
"I have had constantly in mind the kindly help and encouragement
which your cheering words used to bring me when I was even more obscure
than I am now," wrote the younger poet at a later time.
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