Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend
by Lilian Whiting · English · Gutenberg #42147 · 372,306 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend
Author: Lilian Whiting
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON, POET AND FRIEND ***
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON
Poet and Friend
BY
LILIAN WHITING
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1910
_Copyright, 1910_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
Published, September, 1910
_Printers_
S.J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON, U.S.A.
[Illustration: LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON, ÆT. 20
_Frontispiece_]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. 1835-1853 1
II. 1853-1860 26
III. 1860-1876 51
IV. 1876-1880 79
V. 1880-1890 106
VI. 1890-1895 169
VII. 1895-1900 205
VIII. 1900-1906 229
IX. 1907-1908 263
ILLUSTRATIONS
Louise Chandler Moulton, æt. 20 _Frontispiece_
From a daguerreotype.
FACING PAGE
Elmwood Cottage, Pomfret, Conn., the girlhood home
of Louise Chandler Moulton 5
Engraved on a watch belonging to her mother.
Louise Chandler Moulton, æt. 18 34
From a daguerreotype containing a slip of paper upon which
Mrs. Moulton had written, "Taken in Boston the day I
first saw my husband,--Spring of 1853."
Facsimile of a letter from Robert Browning 96
Lucius Lemuel Chandler, Mrs. Moulton's father 104
From an old daguerreotype.
The library in Mrs. Moulton's Boston home, 28 Rutland
Square 109
From a photograph.
Louise Chandler Moulton 122
From a photograph by W. Kurtz.
Facsimile of the original draft of "Laus Veneris," in
Mrs. Moulton's handwriting 143
Facsimile of a letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes 164
Louisa Rebecca Chandler, Mrs. Moulton's mother 199
From an old daguerreotype.
William U. Moulton 215
From a photograph.
Louise Chandler Moulton 227
From a photograph by Mendelssohn, London, taken about
1896.
Louise Chandler Moulton's grave in Mount Auburn,
Cambridge, Mass. 275
Facsimile of book plate from the Memorial Collection
of the Books of Louise Chandler Moulton,
Boston Public Library 282
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON
_POET AND FRIEND_
CHAPTER I
1835-1853
The poet in a golden clime was born
With golden stars above.--TENNYSON.
The lingering charm of a dream that is fled.--L.C.M.
Genius, love, and friendship make up a triple dower which holds within
itself the possibilities of high destiny. Their changing combinations
comprise all intensities of human joy and human sorrow: the richness
of sympathetic companionship; the enchantments of romance; the glow
and passion of artistic achievement; and that power of initiating
noble service which invests life with the
loveliness of perfect deeds
More strong than all poetic thought.
In few lives have these possibilities been more fully realized than in
that of Louise Chandler Moulton, poet and friend, and lover of the
beautiful. Poet born and poet made, she developed her natural lyric
gift into a rare mastery of poetic art. She wore her singing-robes
with an unconscious grace, and found in her power of song the
determining influence which colored and shaped her life. Her lyrics
were the spontaneous expression, the natural out-pouring, of a lofty
and beautiful spirit. Her poetic instinct radiated in her ardent and
generous sympathies, her exquisite interpretations of sentiment and
feeling; it informed all her creative work with a subtle charm
pervasive as the fragrance of a rose. Her artistic impulse was,
indeed, the very mainspring of her life; it expressed itself not only
in the specific forms of lyrics and of prose romance, but in her
varied range of friendships and in her intense and discriminating love
of literature. Mrs. Moulton was not of the order of the poet who
puts what he hath of poetry in his verse
And leaves none for his life.
Her life as well as her art expressed her gift of song. She was a poet
not only in singing, but no less in living. Her friendships were
singularly wide and eclectic, determined always from the inner vision.
They were the friendships of mutual recognition and of sympathetic
ministry. Her tenderness of feeling responded to every human need.
Others might turn away from the unattractive; to her the simple fact
that kindness was needed was a claim which she could not deny.
This was the more striking from the fact that from her early girlhood
her gifts, her culture, and her personal charm won recognition in the
most brilliant circles. To be as unconsciously gracious to peasant as
to prince was in her very nature. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, alluding
to Mrs. Moulton's social prestige in London, wrote:
"... It is pleasant to feel that she owes this result quite
as much to her qualities of character as to her gifts of
intellect. There never lived, perhaps, a more thoroughly
open-hearted and generous woman; and the poorest and least
gifted applicant might always seek her as successfully as
the most famous and influential."
This symmetry of character, a certain fine balance of the gifts of
mind and heart, was the natural outcome, it may be, of a worthy
ancestry. So far as is known, the Chandlers lived originally in
Hampshire, England, where, in the sixteenth century, arms were granted
to them. Many of these Chandlers were men distinguished in their day.
In 1887 was commemorated at Philadelphia the two hundredth anniversary
of the arrival in this country of one of the first Chandlers known to
have immigrated. This was a follower of Fox, who fled from
persecution, and settled in Pennsylvania. A group of ten English
Puritans settled long before the Revolution in what was afterward the
township of Pomfret, Connecticut: and from one of these was descended
Lucius Chandler, the father of Louise. The Chandler family throughout
gave evidence of decided intellectual ability, and this was
strengthened by marriages with other sound Puritan stock. Through her
paternal grandmother Mrs. Moulton was descended from the Rev. Aaron
Cleveland, of literary reputation in the late eighteenth century, and
of account in his day as a wit. This relationship linked her in remote
cousinship with Edmund Clarence Stedman, a tie which both cherished.
The two poets congratulated themselves on a common great-grandmother
who was a classical scholar, famed for her familiarity with Greek.
[Illustration: ELMWOOD COTTAGE, POMFRET, CONN., THE GIRLHOOD HOME OF
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON
_Page 5_]
Lucius L. Chandler married Louisa Rebecca Clark, also of good English
ancestry. Mrs. Chandler has been described by Harriet Prescott
Spofford as "a gentle, gracious woman, a noted beauty in her youth,
but singularly free from the vanity and selfishness of most noted
beauties." The only surviving child of this marriage was born at
Pomfret on April 10, 1835, and was christened Ellen Louise. Mr.
Chandler's farm lay on the edge of the quiet Connecticut town, the
landscape pleasantly diversified by adjacent hills and forests, and
the modest, comfortable home was surrounded by flowers and trees. In
later years, recalling her childhood, Mrs. Moulton wrote:
My thoughts go home to that old brown house
With its low roof sloping down to the east,
And its garden fragrant with roses and thyme
That blossom no longer except in rhyme,
Where the honey-bees used to feast.
Afar in the west the great hills rose,
Silent and steadfast, and gloomy and gray.
I thought they were giants, and doomed to keep
Their watch while the world should wake or sleep,
Till the trumpet should sound on the judgment-day.
And I was as young as the hills were old,
And the world was warm with the breath of spring;
And the roses red and the lilies white
Budded and bloomed for my heart's delight,
And the birds in my heart began to sing.
A winsome little sprite seems Ellen Louise to have been, revealing,
even in her earliest years, a quaint touch of her father's courtly
dignity combined with her mother's refinement and unerring sense of
the amenities of life. Mrs. Chandler's fastidious taste and a certain
innate instinct for the fitness of things, invested her always with a
personal elegance that surrounded her like an atmosphere. A picture
lived in her daughter's memory of her arriving one day, in a bonnet
with pink roses, to visit the school; and of her own childish thought
that no other little girl had so pretty a mother as her own. In after
years she pictured, in one of her sonnets, this beloved mother:
How shall I here her placid picture paint
With touch that shall be delicate, yet sure?
Soft hair above a brow so high and pure
Years have not soiled it with an earthly taint,
Needing no aureole to prove her saint;
Firm mind that no temptation could allure;
Soul strong to do, heart stronger to endure;
And calm, sweet lips that utter no complaint.
So have I seen her, in my darkest days,
And when her own most sacred ties were riven,
Walk tranquilly in self-denying ways,
Asking for strength, and sure it would be given;
Filling her life with lowly prayer, high praise,--
So shall I see her, if we meet in heaven.
The little maid's schooldays seem to have begun before she was out of
the nursery, for a tiny relic has drifted down the years, in the form
of a very brilliant rose painted on a slip of paper,--the paper faded
and yellow with age, the rose as fresh as if colored yesterday,--bearing
the legend: "Miss Ellen L. Chandler deserves my approbation for good
behavior in school. Charlotte Taintor." And this documentary evidence
of the good behavior of "Miss Ellen" is dated August, 1839, when she
was but little past her fourth birthday. It is pleasant to know that
the future poet began her earthly career in a fashion so exemplary;
and a further testimonial exists in a page which has survived for
nearly seventy years, on which a relative, a friendly old gentleman,
had written, in 1840, lines "To Little Ellen," which run in part:
Ah, lovely child! the thought of thee
Still fills my heart with gladness;
Whene'er thy cherub face I see
Its smiles dispel my sadness.
This artless ditty continues through many stanzas, and contains one
line at which the reader to-day can but smile sympathetically:
Thy seraph voice with music breathing;
for this rhapsodical phrase connects itself with the many tributes
paid in later life to her "golden voice." Whittier, expressing his
desire to meet "the benediction of thy face," alludes also to the
music of her tones. That the voice is an index of the soul is a
theory which may easily be accepted by those who have in memory the
clear, soft speech of Mrs. Moulton. Often was she playfully entreated
to
lend to the rhyme of the poet
The music of thy voice;
the lines seeming almost to have been written to describe her recital
of poetry.
The fairies who came to the christening of this golden-haired and
golden-voiced child seemed, indeed, to have given her all good gifts
in full measure. She was endowed with beauty and with genius; she was
born into surroundings of liberal comfort and of refinement; into
prosperity which made possible the gratification of all reasonable
desires and aspirations of a gifted girl. It was her fortune through
life to be sheltered from material anxieties. To a nature less
sensitively perceptive of the needs and sorrows of others, to one less
generous and tender, the indulgence which fell to her as an only and
idolized child, might have fostered that indifference to the condition
of those less favored which deprives its possessor of the richest
experiences of life. With her to see need or misfortune was to feel
the instant impulse to relieve or at least to alleviate the suffering.
Colonel Higginson, in recalling her life in England said:
"I shall never forget, in particular, with what tears in his
eyes the living representative of Philip Bourke Marston
spoke to me in London of her generous self-devotion to his
son, the blind poet, of whom she became the editor and
biographer."
Emerson has declared that comforts and advantages are good if one does
not use them as a cushion on which to go to sleep. With Mrs. Moulton
her native gifts seemed to generate aspiration and effort for noble
achievement.
Among the schoolmates of her childish years was the boy who was
afterward the artist Whistler, who was one year her senior. As
children they often walked home from school together, and one night
the little girl was bewailing that she could not draw a map like the
beautiful one he had displayed to an admiring group that day. It was a
gorgeous creation in colored crayons, an "arrangement" that captivated
the village school with much the same ardor that the future artist was
destined to inspire from the art connoisseurs of two continents. A sad
object, indeed, was the discordant affair that Ellen Louise held up in
self-abasement and hopelessness while she poured out her enthusiasm on
his achievement. The lad received this praise with lofty scorn.
"That's nothing," he exclaimed; "you think this is anything? Take it;
I don't want it; you just see what I can do to-morrow! I'll bring you
then something worth talking about." And with the precious trophy in
her possession, the little girl made her way home. True to his word,
the next morning "Jimmy" brought her a package whose very wrapping
revealed the importance of its contents; and when she had breathlessly
opened it, there was disclosed an exquisite little painting. Under a
Gothic arch that breathed--no one knew what enchanted hints of "the
glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," or some
far-away dreams of Venice, or other dimly prefigured marvel in the
child's fancy, was an old monk; through the picture were silver
gleams, and a vague glint of purple, and altogether, it held some far
prophecy of the brilliant future yet undisclosed. All her life Mrs.
Moulton kept the gift. It had an unobtrusive place in her
drawing-room, and even figured modestly at the great Whistler
exhibition which was held in Boston by the Copley Society after the
death of the artist.
In some ways Ellen Louise had a rather lonely childhood save that an
imaginative and poetic nature peoples a world of its own. The little
girl had, as it chanced, no playmates near at hand to supply the place
of brothers and sisters; and her companions were those that fancy
created. In later years she wrote of this period:
"I never felt alone. Dream children companioned me, and were
as real to my thoughts as if other eyes than my own could
have seen them. Their sorrows saddened me, their mirth
amused me, they shared my visions, my hopes; and the strange
dread with which I--brought up in a Puritan household where
election and predestination were familiar words--looked
forward to the inevitable end.
"Yet haunted as I was by the phantom future, I was happy in
the present. I am afraid I was what is called a spoiled
child. I loved horses and I loved verses, and on my eighth
birthday two presents were made me--a well-equipped saddle
horse, and a book of poems. The horse ran away with me that
same afternoon while my too sociable father, who was riding
with me, stopped to talk town politics with a neighbor; but
my steed raced homeward, and I reached my own door in
safety. The book of verse I have yet. It was by Mrs.
Hemans--now so cruelly forgotten."
Her imaginative nature showed itself in many ways. She says:
"I was not allowed to read fiction or to play any but the
most serious games.... Hence I was thrown upon my own
resources for amusement. I remember when I was only eight
years old carrying in my head all the summer a sort of
Spanish drama, as I called it, though I knew little of Spain
except some high-sounding Spanish names which I gave to my
characters. Each day, as soon as I could get away by myself,
I summoned these characters as if my will had been a sort of
invisible call-boy, and then watched them performing. It did
not seem to me that I created them, but rather that I
summoned them, and their behavior often astonished me. For
one of them, a young girl, who obstinately persisted in
dying of consumption, I sincerely grieved."
She had written from the age of seven verses which would hardly have
discredited her maturer years. A stanza written when she was nine
runs:
Autumn is a pleasant time
Breathing beauty in our clime;
Even its flowerets breathe of love
Which is sent us from above.
The lines seem to have written themselves, but as Autumn had been
assigned as a theme-subject at school she dealt with it also in prose.
She began with the assertion: "Autumn to the contemplative mind is the
loveliest season of the year"; and closed with the rather startling
line: "All these are beautiful, but let us leave the contemplation of
them until another winter dawns on the languid sea of human life." One
almost wonders that under a training which permitted English so florid
Mrs. Moulton was able to develop her admirable style. At ten she was
writing "An Address to the Ocean" and a meditation on "Hope." Another
effort was "The Bell of My Native City," and this she explained in a
footnote as an imaginative composition, composed to express the
feelings of an exile who had been "unjustly banished from his
country." She was taken a few months later on a little trip to "Tribes
Hill" on the Mohawk, and in a "History of My Journey Home from Tribes
Hill" records gravely:
"It was a beautiful September morning that ushered in the
day of my departure. I rose with the first dawning of light
to gaze once more upon those scenes whose loveliness I had
so loved to trace. I rejoiced to pay a tribute of gratitude
to some of the many friends whose society had contributed so
much to my happiness when away from the home of my
childhood.... At noon I started.... For many a mile, as we
were drawn with dazzling rapidity by our wild steam horse
(whose voice resounded like the rolling of distant thunder),
I could catch glimpses of the dark blue waters of the
Mohawk, which I had so loved to gaze upon, and to whose
music I had so often listened in the hush of evening, from
my open window, or when walking on its green banks with a
friend, dearly loved and highly prized, but whom I shall,
perhaps, meet no more forever.... As I rode along my
thoughts reverted to her. The river gleaming in quiet beauty
from beneath the green foliage of its fringing trees
reminded me of the hours we had spent together in
contemplating it. The excitement of travelling and the loved
home to which I was hastening were alike forgotten in these
reveries of the past."
A sentence of more than a hundred and fifty words that follows quite
graphically depicts a walk taken with this friend, and the child
continued:
"From such reveries of the past was I awakened by the
stopping of the cars at Albany. That night we embarked on
board a steamboat, and as we glided o'er the Hudson river,
my heart bounded with delight. I stood alone before an open
window, and my soul drank in the richness of the scene."
One can but smile at this rhapsody of the child of eleven, but it is
after all suggestive of literary powers genuine if undeveloped. It
shows, too, a nature sensitive to beauty and a heart full of quick
responsiveness to friendship. The gifts of the woman are foreshadowed
even in the extravagances of the girl.
The blank books in which Louise recorded her impressions and thoughts
and copied out her verses in the years between eight and eighteen
afford material for a curious study of unfolding tendencies. A
religious meeting to which she is taken suggests a long dissertation
on "The Missionary;" and this sketch assumes an imaginative form. The
missionary and his bride are described as voyaging over the ocean to
the field of his labors in these terms:
"... But when they had entirely lost sight of land Charles
clasped his loved one to his heart and whispered, 'Be
comforted, dearest; we go not alone, for is not He with us
who said, "Lo, I am with thee always, even unto the end of
the world!"'... The young bride burst into an agony of
tears.... Her husband led her on deck, and showed her the
sun's last, golden rays that lay upon the waves, sparkling
like a thousand brilliants.... It seemed a sea of burning
gold.... A high and holy resolve rose in the hearts of the
young missionaries.... They had left a circle of brilliant
acquaintances for the untutored heathen.... They left the
deck to sit down in a quiet nook and read the word of Him
for whom they forsook all earthly pleasures."
Not only do the note-books give such hints of the future story-teller,
but they abound in verse. It is noticeable that although much of this
is crude and inevitably childish, it is yet remarkably free from false
measures. The child had been gifted by heaven with an ear wonderfully
true. The books contain also many quotations copied from the volumes
she was from time to time reading. Moore, Mrs. Hemans, Tupper, Willis,
Longfellow, Whittier, Campbell, are among the names found here most
frequently. Curiously enough the record shows no trace of Scott, of
Byron, of Wordsworth, or of Coleridge.
One of the felicitous orderings of her schooldays was that which
placed her as a pupil of the Rev. Roswell Park, the Episcopal rector
in Pomfret, and Principal of a school called Christ Church Hall. Here
she easily carried off the honors when "compositions" were required.
"Will Miss Ellen Louise Chandler please remain a moment after the
school is dismissed," was the disconcerting request of the teacher one
day.
The purpose of the interview was a private inquiry where the girl had
"found" the poem which she had read in the literary exercises of the
afternoon.
"Why, I can't tell," she answered; "it all wrote itself from my own
mind."
The instructor looked at her earnestly for a moment,--this dainty
young girl with the rose-flush deepening in her sweet face,--and
replied: "Then I sincerely congratulate you." And she went on her way.
The commonplace books of her thirteenth year, kept while she was still
a pupil at this school, show more clearly than ever the dawning power
of the young poet. Her reading was not indiscriminate, but selective,
inclining almost equally to poetry and to serious prose. Of the usual
schoolgirl love of novels is little evidence; and this is the more
curious as her fancy was active, and she was writing many stories.
Literary form, also, was beginning to appeal to her, and she copies "A
Remarkable Specimen of Alliteration."
She took life seriously in the fashion of her generation. It was a
time when every girl loved a diminutive; she wrote her name "Nellie"
and signed her verses "Nellie C." Those were the days of the annuals,
"Friendship's Wreath," "The Literary Garland" and the like, and to
these after once she began to see herself in print, "Nellie C." became
quickly a favorite contributor.
She tasted the rapture of a poet born who first sees his verses in
print, when she was fourteen. This is her account:
"I used to rhyme as long ago as I can remember anything, and
I sent my first contribution to a newspaper when I was
fourteen years old.... I remember how secretly, and almost
as if it were a crime, I sent it in; and when I found the
paper one evening, upon calling at the post-office on my way
home from school, and saw my lines--my very own lines--it
seemed to me a much more wonderful and glorious event than
has anything since that time.... Perhaps it was unfortunate
for me that it was accepted at once, since it encouraged me
in the habit of verse,--making a habit which future
occupations confirmed. But one gain, at least, came to
me,--the friendship and encouragement of authors whose work
I loved. I was scarcely eighteen when my first book was
published. I called it 'This, That, and the Other,' because
it was made up of short stories, sketches (too brief and
immature to call essays), and the rhymes into which, from
the first, I put more of myself than into any other form of
expression. Strangely enough, the book sold largely."
This early poem was printed in a daily of Norwich, Connecticut, and no
recognition of after years could ever give quite the same thrill as
this first sight of her name and her own verse in print.
Among her girl-friends was Virginia F. Townsend, later to be known
also as a writer of stories and of verse, and the pair exchanged
numerous rhymes, rather facile than poetic, but doubtless useful in
the way of 'prentice work. A poem which Miss Chandler wrote in her
sixteenth year and called "Lenore"--in those days every youthful
rhymester rhymed to Lenore,--and designated as "for music," was much
praised by the newspapers of the day. It is as admirably typical of
the fashion of the day as the bonnets of the forties which one finds
in a dusty attic.
Hush thy footfall, lightly tread;
Passing by a loved one's bed.
Dust hath gathered on her brow,
Silently she resteth now.
Sank she into dreamless rest
Clasping rosebuds to her breast;
With her forehead pale and fair
'Neath the midnight of her hair....
There we laid her down to sleep
Where the wild flowers o'er her weep.
Earth below and blue sky o'er,
Sweetly sleeps our own Lenore.
Another lyric, written about this time to Governor Cleveland on the
death of his only daughter, contained these lines:
What time she braided up her hair
With summer buds and sprays of flowers,
It was as if some saint had shed
Heaven's light on this dim world of ours;
And kneeling where her feet have trod,
We watched to see the glory break
When angel fingers at the dawn
Heaven's portals opened for her sake.
Of these lines Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote with youthful
enthusiasm:
"This is almost equal to the picture of Madeline in 'The Eve
of St. Agnes,' as she kneels before the oriel window of the
casement, high and triple-arched, in all the holiness of
prayer."
The stories which the young writer contributed to the gift-books bore
the most startling titles: "Inez Caisco; or, The Flower of Catalonia";
"Beatrice; or, The Beautiful Tambourine Girl"; "Evilia; or, The
Enchantress." Of Isabel Sydenham, the heroine of one of these tales,
it is told that she "threw open her casement,"--no self-respecting
story-teller of the mid-century called a window anything but a
casement,--and sighed: "If he were only here, how we might enjoy the
surpassing loveliness!" Of this sensitive creature, who naturally
"yearns" for all sorts of impossible things, her creator remarks that
"ideality was the predominating characteristic of her mind." According
to gift-book standards no heroine could be more eminently
satisfactory.
Not content with being a contributor to the annuals of others, Miss
Chandler compiled a gift-book of her own: "The Book of the Boudoir; a
Gift for All Seasons, Edited by Ellen Louise." By her publisher's
insistence her own portrait formed the frontispiece, and the book
contained also an engraving of Elmwood Cottage. The letter-press
opened with an "Invocation to the Spirit of Poetry" by the youthful
editor, and besides sketches and verses of her own the volume offered
contributions by Mrs. Sigourney, Virginia F. Townsend, George S.
Burleigh, Amanda M. Douglas, and others.
With this publication Miss Chandler may be said to have come fully and
formally into full-fledged authorship. She was deeply tinged with the
sentimental fashions which reigned universally in America in the
middle of the nineteenth century, and which had, indeed, by no means
disappeared in England; but she had genuine feeling, a natural
instinct for literary form, an ear unusually sensitive to metrical
effect, and her real power had already shown itself unmistakably. From
this time on her progress in her art was sure and constant.
One influence of her youthful environment may be mentioned here since
it has been often commented upon. The strain of melancholy habitual in
Mrs. Moulton's poetry has been ascribed to the shadow which was cast
upon her childhood by the sternness of the Calvinistic faith. An
English critic has written:
"She was brought up in abysmal Puritan Calvinism, and her
slumber at night was disturbed by terrific visions of a
future of endless torment. The doctrine of election pressed
heavily on her youthful soul.... The whole upbringing of
children in Puritan circles in those days was strict and
stern to a degree impossible to be realized in a day when
vulgar sentimentalism rules supreme, and when it is
considered cruel and harsh to flog a rebellious boy. The way
in which children were brought up by the Puritans of New
England in Mrs. Moulton's day may have had its faults, but
it turned out a class of person whom it is hopeless to
expect the present day methods of education will ever be
able to produce."
In this are both truth and exaggeration. The parents of Mrs. Moulton
were, it is true, Calvinists, but they were neither bigots nor
fanatics. The question was quite as much that of the sensitive,
delicately responsive temperament of the child as of the doctrine in
which she was reared. Being what she was, she realized to the full the
possible horrors involved in the theology of the time, and
imaginatively suffered intensely. She once said to a London
interviewer:
"I remember that the Calvinistic doctrines I was taught
filled my imagination with an awful foreboding of doom and
despair. I can recall waking in the depth of the night, cold
with horror, and saying to myself, 'Why, if I'm not among
the elect, I _can't_ be saved, no matter how hard I try,'
and stealing along on my little bare feet to my mother's
bed, praying to be taken in, with a vague sense that if I
must be lost in the far future, at least now I must go where
love could comfort me, and human arms shelter me from the
shapeless terrors that mocked my solitude."
While, however, the lack of a more encouraging interpretation of
Divine Goodness undoubtedly was to a degree responsible for the minor
chords which became habitual in her verse, the natural longing which
is part of the poetic nature, was in Mrs. Moulton unusually strong and
was exaggerated by the literary modes of her day. On the whole the
influences of her childhood were sweet and sound and wholesome. Her
natural love of beauty was fed and developed, her inherent literary
taste was nourished by sympathy and by success, and her wonderful
sensitiveness to literary form trained by early and constant practice.
It is even possible that the very harshness of Calvinism, which was
almost the only shadow, was a healthful influence which deepened and
strengthened her art, that might without this have suffered from
sunshine too uninterrupted.
CHAPTER II
1853-1860
A beautiful and happy girl
With step as light as summer air.--WHITTIER.
Her glorious fancies come from far
Beneath the silver evening-star,
And yet her heart is ever near.--LOWELL.
At dawn of Love, at dawn of Life.--L.C.M.
In a lyric written by Mrs. Moulton in after years, occurs the lovely
line quoted above, which seems vividly to describe her as she stood, a
girl of eighteen, on the threshold of a new phase of life.
Young as she was Miss Chandler had already, by her newspaper and
magazine work, made for herself a reputation, and she now collected
the papers which made up the volume spoken of in the previous chapter,
"This, That, and the Other," with the encouraging result of a sale of
twenty thousand copies. The _North American Review_ was then almost
the only magazine in the country exclusively devoted to criticism and
the intellectual life. Much of the best literary work of the time, in
the way of fiction and poetry, appeared in such periodicals as
_Godey's Lady's Book_, _Peterson's Magazine_, and the like; and to
these Miss Chandler was a constant contributor. The weekly newspapers
were rich in poems by Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, the Cary sisters,
N.P. Willis, Poe, and many others of permanent fame. Besides these, a
host of the transient singers of the day, literary meteors, flitted
across the firmament, not unfrequently with some song or story which
individually was quite as worthy of recognition as were those of their
contemporaries whose power to sustain themselves in longer flights and
to make good the early promise has earned their title to permanent
recognition. Mrs. Moulton's scrapbooks indicate how rich were the
literary columns of the newspapers in those days. There being then no
international copyright law, the American editor enriched his page
with the latest poem of Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, or Mrs.
Browning. Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Dr. Parsons, Nora Perry,
William Winter, the Stoddards (Richard Henry and Elizabeth), N.P.
Willis, Saxe, Mrs. Stowe, Jean Ingelow, Miss Mulock, Aldrich, and Mary
Clemmer, are largely represented in these old scrapbooks. Many
fugitive poems, too, appear, as the "Bertha" of Anne Whitney, a poem
well entitled to literary immortality; the "Three Kisses of Farewell,"
by Saxe Holm; the "Unseen Spirits," by Willis, a poem too little
known; and Mr. Aldrich's "The Unforgiven," excluded from his later
editions, but which contains those beautiful lines:
In the East the rose of morning biddeth fair to blossom soon,
But it never, never blossoms in this picture; and the moon
Never ceases to be crescent, and the June is always June.
Miss Chandler's book was one of over four hundred pages, illustrated
by the famous Rouse (whose portrait of Emerson has always been so
highly considered), and its fine engravings and its binding of crimson
cloth combined to give it a sumptuous appearance. The _Springfield
Republican_ gave it pleasant recognition in these words:
"The writings of a young girl still on the threshold of life
and still to be regarded as a bright, incarnate
promise,--her writings are very graceful, very tender, and
very beautiful, just what the flowers of life's spring
should be."
The young author dedicated her book to her mother in tender phrase,
and her artless "Preface" was one to disarm any adverse view.
In after years Mrs. Moulton smilingly replied to some questions
regarding her initiation into authorship:
"I remember the huge posters with which they placarded the
walls, headed, 'Read this book and see what a girl of
eighteen can do.' I think I had the grace to be a little
shocked at these posters, but the reviews were so kind, and
said such lovely things that--Ah! shall I ever be so happy
again as when I read them!"
Edmund Clarence Stedman, who had just left Yale College and who, at
the beginning of his literary career, was editing a country paper in
Connecticut, greeted Miss Chandler's book with the ardent praise of
youth and friendship; but these warm phrases of approval were also the
almost unanimous expression of all the reviewers of the day. The
twentieth century reader may smile at Mr. Stedman's youthful distrust
of the "strong-minded woman," but his remarks are interesting. Of
"This, That, and the Other," he wrote:
"'This, That, and the Other,' is a collection of prose
sketches and verse from the pen of a young lady fast rising
into a literary reputation; a reputation which, though it
is achieved in no 'Uncle Tom' or 'Fanny Fern' mode, is no
less sure than that of Mrs. Stowe, or Sara Payson Willis,
and will be more substantial, in that the works on which it
is founded are more classic and in better taste.... Miss
Chandler is a native of Pomfret in this state, and every
denizen of Connecticut should be proud of her talents. She
is beautiful and interesting; her manners are in marked
distinction from the forwardness of the strong-minded woman
of the day...."
Epes Sargent, in the _Boston Transcript_, said:
"... The ladies have invaded the field of fiction and
carried off its most substantial triumphs. Mrs. Stowe, Fanny
Fern, and now another name, if the portents do not deceive
us, is about to be added--that of Miss Chandler, who
although the youngest of the band (she is not yet nineteen),
is overflowing with genius and promise. Such tales as those
of 'Silence Adams,' 'A Husking Party at Ryefield,' 'Agnes
Lee,' and 'Only an Old Maid,' reveal the pathos, the beauty,
the power, the depth and earnestness of emotion that Ellen
Louise has the art of transfusing into the humblest and
most commonplace details.... But Ellen Louise must not be
deceived by injudicious admiration. Her style, purified,
chastened and subdued, would lose none of its
attractiveness. She gives evidence of too noble a habit of
thought to desire the success which comes of the hasty
plaudits of the hour."
The book reviewing of 1853 was apparently not unlike the spelling of
George Eliot's poor Mr. Tulliver,--"a matter of private judgment." For
although the stories of Ellen Louise were singularly sweet and winsome
in their tone, with an unusual grasp of sentiment and glow of fancy
for so youthful and inexperienced a writer, they could yet hardly
claim to rank with the work of Mrs. Stowe. The leading papers of that
day united, however, in an absolute chorus of praise for the young
author, who is pronounced "charming," and "overflowing with talent";
the "refinement and delicacy" of her work, her "rare maturity of
thought and style," and a myriad other literary virtues were discerned
and celebrated to the extent that the resources of the language of the
country would allow. A sonnet was written to her, signed "B.P.S.,"
which signature is easily translated to us in these days as that of
B.P. Shillaber, the author of "Mrs. Partington." The sonnet is
entitled:
TO ELLEN LOUISE
Take this, and that, and t'other all together,
We like you better every day we're breathing;
And round our hearts this pleasant summer weather
Your fairy fingers deathless flowers are weaving:
We read delightedly your charming pages
Fraught in each line with truth and magic beauty;
Here starts a tear that some hid woe assuages,
And there is heard a voice that calls to duty.
And proudly may Connecticut, sweet Ellen,
Point to the genius bright that crowns her daughter,
And the rare graces that she doth excel in,
Confessed in floods of praise from every quarter.
The world forgives the wooden nutmeg suction
Because of you, the best Connecticut production.
The succeeding year Miss Chandler passed at Mrs. Willard's Seminary in
Troy, N.Y., and a classmate, who in after years became the wife of
General Gillespie, thus describes her:
"My acquaintance with Louise Chandler began when she entered
Mrs. Willard's Seminary in Troy, where we were both pupils.
She was at once very much admired and beloved. Her first
book, called 'This, That, and the Other,' had been published
just before she came, and we were all very proud of her
authorship. She had a lovely face, very fair, with
beautiful, wavy, sunny hair, falling on either side the deep
blue-gray eyes, with their dark, long lashes. Her voice was
clear and sweet, with the most cultivated intonation."
For the school Commencement Miss Chandler was chosen class poet, and
produced the regulation poem, neither better nor worse than is usual
on such occasions. Six weeks later, August 27, 1855, she married
William Upham Moulton, editor and publisher of _The True Flag_, a
Boston literary journal to which his bride had been a frequent
contributor.
The journalists of the day made many friendly comments upon the
marriage of their brother editor. Some of them ran thus:
"The possession of a noble and true heart in the one, and of
a gentle and winning nature in the other, are presages of
future bliss."
"Mr. Moulton is a writer of much originality of style and
great power; an independent thinker, shrewd in conclusions
and fearless in expression. Miss Chandler overflows with
kindness, geniality, appreciation of the lovely, and the
power of description to a remarkable degree."
"... Of his choice the world can speak. Her literary
attainments have made their public mark, and her kindness of
heart has won for her an eminent place in the affections of
thousands. Our associate may well be congratulated on his
acquisition of a new contributor to his happiness, and
pardoned, in view of the richness of his prize, for leaving
the fair of our own locality for more distant Connecticut."
[Illustration: LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON, ÆT. 18
_Page 34_]
One of the girlish pictures of Miss Chandler bears the inscription, in
her own writing, "Taken the day I first saw my husband," but
unfortunately, the date is not given. In a little sketch Harriet
Prescott Spofford remarks that "Louise must have combined studying,
writing, and love-making to a rather remarkable degree during her last
year at school"; and adds in regard to her marriage:
"She was barely twenty when she married William Upham
Moulton, a man of culture and of much personal attraction.
Lingering a moment on the church porch in the sunset light,
she has been described by one who saw her as a radiant
being, in her bridal veil, blooming, blushing, full of life
and joy and love. An exquisite skin, the 'rose crushed on
ivory,' hazel eyes, with dark lashes and brows, and a
confiding, fearless glance, small white teeth, a delightful
smile, cheek and chin having the antique line, all united to
make a loveliness which no portrait has successfully
rendered, and which tender consideration and grace of manner
accented to wonderful charm."
Among her girlish treasures preserved for more than fifty years was a
small blank book, on the fly-leaf of which she had written: "Ellen
Louise Chandler Moulton, from my husband, Aug. 27, 1855, Elmwood
Cottage, Pomfret, Conn."; and underneath in quotation, the lines:
"Who shall decide? The bridal day, oh, make it
A day of sacrament and present prayer;
Though every circumstance conspire to take it
Out of the common prophecy of care!
Let not vain merriment and giddy laughter
Be the last sound in the departing ear,
For God alone can tell what cometh after--
What store of sorrow, or what cause to fear."
Mr. Moulton brought his bride to Boston, where she was at once
introduced into those literary circles made up of the chief men and
women of letters. "Here," said one who remembers her entrance into
Boston life, "the bright, quick, impassioned girl speedily blossomed
into the brilliant woman." In some reminiscences of her own in
recalling this delightful period she said:
"Every one was very good to me--Dr. Holmes, Longfellow,
Whittier--all those on whose work I had been brought up. And
then the broader religious thought of Boston began to
conquer the Puritanism in which I had been educated.
Whittier was a Quaker, but he believed most of all in the
loving Fatherhood of God,--the Divine care which would
somehow, somewhere, make creation a blessing to all on whom
had been bestowed the unsought gift of life. He told me once
how this conviction first came to him. It was a touching
anecdote of his childhood when his mother's tenderness to
the erring aroused in him the perception of the goodness of
God. Whittier was a singularly modest man; if one praised
his work he would say, 'Yes, but there should be a
perfection of form, and what I do is full of faults.' Once,
at an evening party, he was vainly entreated to recite one
of his poems. 'No,' he said, 'but I wish she would,'
pointing to me. I then read 'The Swan Song of Parson Avery,'
and when I had finished he came across the room and said,
'Why, thee has really made me think I've written a
beautiful poem.'
"No words could overpraise the sweet graciousness of
Longfellow and Dr. Holmes to me, a new-comer into their
world. I knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, also. The very last time
I saw him he had just returned from California, and he
crossed the Athenæum Library, where we chanced to be, to ask
me if I had ever been there myself and had seen the big
trees. 'Why,' he said, 'it took thirteen horses to go round
one tree, the head of one touching the tail of another--what
do you think of that?'
"I remember once, when I was a guest in his house in
Concord, his telling me that he had long wanted to make an
anthology of the one-poem men. And he went on to speak of
the poets who were remembered by only one poem. He never
carried out his idea, but I wish some one else might."
It was a rich and stimulating atmosphere into which Mrs. Moulton
entered in Boston. The first winter after her marriage Thackeray
visited this country and gave in Boston, in January of that year
(1856), his lectures on "The Four Georges." In recalling these, Mrs.
Moulton afterward said:
"I sat close to the platform, thoroughly entranced, and
longing to speak to him--this great man! longing with all a
romantic schoolgirl's ardor and capacity for hero-worship. I
never missed a lecture. The last day and the last lecture
came, and as Mr. Thackeray came from the platform he bent
toward me and said: 'I shall miss the kind, encouraging face
that has sat beneath me for so many hours'; and I was too
surprised to be able to answer him a word. But it is a
memory that has never left me."
Boston in the fifties had little to boast of in the artistic line.
Henry James, writing of Hawthorne's time, noted with amusement the
devotion to the "attenuated outlines" of Flaxman's drawings. The
classic old Athenæum contained practically all that the city could
offer in the way of art. Here were some casts from antique marbles,
specimens of the work of Greenough and Thorwaldsen, a certain number
of dull busts of interesting men, a supply of engravings, and a small
collection of paintings. The paintings were largely copies, but
included originals by Allston, Copley, and a few others.
In music the taste was pure, if the opportunities were but provincial.
Grisi and Mario in brief visits delighted the town in opera; the
Handel and Haydn Society provided oratorio; the Harvard Orchestra gave
instrumental concerts. In the spring of 1856 was held a Beethoven
Festival, and the bronze statue, so long familiar in the old Boston
Music Hall, was inaugurated with a poem by the sculptor, William
Wetmore Story.
In intellectual life Boston had long been distinguished among American
cities. In these early years of Mrs. Moulton's life here Lowell gave
his course of lectures on "Poetry" before the Lowell Institute, and
Curtis his course on "Bulwer and Disraeli." Longfellow at this time
was writing "Hiawatha"; Richard Grant White was often coming over from
New York to confer with the Cambridge group on nice points in his
edition of Shakespeare. The interest in literature is illustrated by
the fact that when "Maud" appeared in the summer of 1855 Longfellow
and George William Curtis made a pilgrimage to Newport to read and
discuss it with Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. The aristocratic ideal in the
world into which Mrs. Moulton had come was distinctly intellectual
rather than plutocratic.
The year of her marriage was also the year of the publication of her
second book, a novel entitled "Juno Clifford," which was brought out
anonymously by the Appletons. Again the praise of the reviewers was
practically unanimous. A Boston critic wrote: "The authorship is a
mystery which perhaps time will unravel, for rumor is ascribing it to
lofty names in the world of literature"; and George D. Prentice, in
the _Louisville Journal_, in less journalistic phrase, characterized
the story as having "numerous points of strange beauty and a strange
pathos."
Among the sympathetic friends who at this time enriched Mrs. Moulton's
life none was of personality more striking than Mrs. Sarah Helen
Whitman, whose connection with Poe was at once so touching and so
tragic. "No person ever made on me so purely spiritual an impression,"
wrote Mrs. Moulton in _The Athenæum_ in after years, "as did Mrs.
Whitman. One of her friends said of her: 'She is nothing but a soul
with a sweet voice.'" Some of the poems signed "Ellen Louise" had
attracted the attention of Mrs. Whitman, and a correspondence
followed. In a postscript to the first letter written to Mrs. Moulton
after her marriage, Mrs. Whitman says:
"You ask my plans. I have none nor ever had. All my life I
have been one of those who walk by faith and not by sight. I
never can plan ahead. The first words I ever learned to
speak were caught from hearing the watchman call out in the
middle of the night, 'All's well.' This has always been my
great article of faith. An angel seems ever to turn for me
at the right time the mystic pages of the book of life,
while I stand wondering and waiting,--that is all."
On the appearance of "Juno Clifford," Mrs. Whitman wrote:
_Mrs. Whitman to Mrs. Moulton_
NOVEMBER 15 [1855].
MY DEAR LOUISE: I have read "Juno Clifford," and my "honest
opinion" is that it is a very fascinating story, eloquently
related. I was surprised at its finished excellence; yet I
expected much from you.
I have written a notice for the _Journal_ which will appear
in a few days. I will send you a copy of the paper. I wish I
had leisure to tell you all I think of the book. You have
all the qualities requisite for a successful novelist, and
some very rare ones, as I think. The grief of the poor Irish
girl brought tears to my eyes,--eyes long accustomed to look
serenely on human sorrows. The character of Juno is
admirably portrayed and you have managed the "heavy tragedy"
with admirable skill. I do not, however, like to have Juno
tear out her beautiful hair by "handfuls," and I think there
is a lavish expenditure of love scenes in the latter part of
the book; but all young lovers will freely pardon you for
this last offence, and I am not disposed to be hypercritical
about the hair.
I can find nothing else to condemn, though I would fain show
myself an impartial judge. I wish "Juno" all success, and am
ever, with sincere regard,
Your friend,
S. HELEN WHITMAN.
P.S.--I saw the death of Miss Locke in _The Times_! could it
have been our Miss Locke? Do you know? I am very busy just
now. I have no good pen, and my pencil turns round and round
like an inspired Dervish, but utters no sound; so look on my
chirography with Christian charity, and love me,
nevertheless.
S.H.W.
In other letters from Mrs. Whitman, undated, but evidently written
about this time, are these passages:
"I have to-day found time to thank you for your letter and
beautiful poem. It is very fine, picturesque, and dramatic.
These are, I think, your strong points, but you have touches
of pathos.... You must not leave off writing stories, nor do
I see any necessity of making any selection between the muse
of poetry and the muse of romance. I should say, give
attendance to both, as the inspiration comes.... Dr. Holmes,
whom I met at the lectures of Lola Montez, is charmed by
her...."
"Mrs. Davis read me Mrs. [R.H.] Stoddard's book ['Two Men'],
because you spoke of it so highly. It has, indeed, a strange
power,--not one that fascinates me, but which impresses me
profoundly and piques my curiosity to know more of the
author. I marked some paragraphs which indicated a
half-conscious power of imaginative description, which I
wish she would exercise more freely. Tell me about her in
her personal traits of character.... I hope you will not
impugn my taste, dear Louise, when I tell you I like your
'two men' better than Mrs. Stoddard's. 'Margaret Holt' is a
charming story. Why is it that Mrs. Stoddard so entirely
ignores all sweet and noble emotions?"
Mrs. Moulton's next volume was a collection of the stories which she
had contributed to various magazines. It was entitled "My Third Book,"
and was brought out by the Harpers in 1859. It was greeted as a work
which "bears the seal of feminine grace," and which "reveals the
beauty of Mrs. Moulton's genius." Of two of the tales a reviewer said,
in terms which give with amusing fidelity the tone of the favorable
book-notice of the mid-century:
"'No. 101' reminds us of some wondrous statue, her pen has
so sculptured the whole story. 'Four Letters from Helen
Hamilton' are enough to stir all hearts with their [_sic_]
high purpose and the beautiful ideal of womanhood which
consecrate [_sic_] them."
Continuing her old habit at school, Mrs. Moulton for many years kept
notes of her abundant reading, and the comments and extracts set down
in her exquisite handwriting throw a most interesting light on the
growth of her thought. She mentions Miss Austen's "Sense and
Sensibility" as "interesting, but deficient in earnestness." "Guy
Livingston," that old-fashioned apotheosis of brute force, she, like
most of the novel-readers of the time, found "fascinating." "The
Scarlet Letter" impresses her profoundly, and she copies many
passages; the first volume of "Modern Painters" she reads with the
most serious earnestness, and comments at length upon Ruskin's view
that public opinion has no claim to be taken as a standard in the
judgment of works of art. Although the bride of a few months, and not
yet twenty-one, she enters with the enthusiasm of a schoolgirl into
the larger opportunities of life opened to her by her marriage. To
English literature she gives herself in serious study. She writes
copious analyses of the history of different periods, and critical
studies of various writers. It was perhaps at this period that she
began to respond to the work of the Elizabethan lyricists with a
sympathy which marked the kinship which English critics found so
evident in her poetic maturity.
The list of books noted in these records during the next ten years is
large and varied. Mrs. Gaskell, Bishop Butler, Dr. Martineau, Miss
Mulock (Mrs. Craik), Anthony Trollope, and later George Eliot and
George Meredith, are among the writers whom she mentions; and from the
"Self-Help" of Samuel Smiles in 1860 she makes copious extracts. Her
taste was catholic, and her attitude toward literature always one of
genuine seriousness.
Mrs. Moulton's memoranda for her own stories are both interesting and
suggestive. To see as it were the mind of the creative writer at work
is always fascinating, and here, as in the "American Notebooks" of
Hawthorne, the reader seems to be assisting in the very laboratory of
the imagination. Some of these notes are as follows:
"Have the story written by a man. Have him go all his life
worshipping one woman, even from boyhood. He wins her,--she
is cold but he is satisfied and believes she will grow to
love him. After three years she leaves him. He gives his
life to seeking her. At last finds her just as she is
attempting to drown herself, and takes her home."
And again:
"Have a wealthy family travelling in Egypt, and a child born
to them there who shall bear the name of the country. This
child, Egypt Sunderland, seems to be strangely influenced by
her name, and develops all the peculiar characteristics of
the Egyptian women."
She conceives the outline plots for numerous stories,--among the
titles for which are "The Sculptor's Model," "The Unforgiven Sin,"
"The River Running Fast," "The Embroidered Handkerchief," "A Wife's
Confession," "The Widow's Candle and How It Went Out." For one
projected story her outline runs:
"Show that there is punishment for our sins lying in the
consequence of them, which no repentance can avert, or
forgiveness condone,--which must be suffered to the
uttermost. Make it clear that passive goodness is not
enough. We must do something for humanity. That a man who
has no moral fibre or practical wisdom has a claim on us for
help. For energy and good judgment are as much a gift as are
eyes to see and ears to hear. The very lack of practical
wisdom gives the one so lacking a special claim on our
sympathies."
Perhaps no one ever lived more in accord with this little gospel of
human duty than did Mrs. Moulton, and this fact invests the note with
a peculiar interest.
The fiction of the day was little concerned with character-drawing or
mental analysis, but was largely occupied with a certain didactic
embodiment of ideals of conduct. In such fiction a writer of Mrs.
Moulton's genuine sincerity of temperament could not but show clearly
her true attitude toward the deeper problems of life. The opening of
one of her stories, "Margaret Grant," will illustrate this fact.
"The love of life, the love of children, the love of
kin--these constrain all of us; but it was another kind of
love that constrained Margaret Grant. Curiously enough the
first awakening came to her soul from a book written by an
unbeliever, a book meant to bring Christianity to the final
test of final obedience, and to prove its absurdity, thereby
prove that to be a Christian as Christ taught, would
overthrow the uses of the world, and uproot the whole system
of things. 'Let the uses of the world go, and the system of
things take care of itself,' Margaret Grant said when she
laid the book down. 'This same religion of Christ is the
best thing I know, and I will go where it leads me.' And
then she waited for the true Guide, that Holy Spirit which
shall be given to every honest soul that seeks--waited for
her special work, but not idly, since every day and all the
days were the little offices of love that make life sweeter
for whatever fellow-pilgrim comes in our way.
"Margaret read to her half-blind grandmother--taught the
small boy that ran the family errands to read--helped her
mother with the housekeeping, all on the lines of 'godly
George Herbert,' who wrote:
Who sweeps a room as for God's laws,
Makes that and the action fine.
But all the time she felt that these were not the real work
of her life, that work which was on its way."
With the earnestness of spirit which is shown in this and which so
continually sounded in her poems, Mrs. Moulton lived her rich life in
the congenial atmosphere which surrounded her. Mrs. Spofford, writing
of Mrs. Moulton from personal memory, says of her in 1860:
"She was now in her twenty-fifth year, fully launched upon
the literary high-seas, contributing to _Harper's_, the
_Galaxy_, and _Scribner's_ as they came into existence, and
to the _Young Folks_, the _Youth's Companion_, and other
periodicals for children. Her life seemed a fortunate one.
She had a charming home in Boston where she met and
entertained the most pleasant people; her housekeeping
duties were fulfilled to a nicety, and no domestic detail
neglected for all her industrious literary undertakings. A
daughter had been born to her, Florence, to whom 'Bed-time
Stories' were dedicated in some most tender and touching
verses, and, somewhat later, a son whose little life was
only numbered by days."
Life was deepening and offering ever wider horizons. With Emily
Dickinson she might have said of the complex interweaving of event,
influence, and inspiration:
Ah! the bewildering thread!
The tapestries of Paradise
So notelessly are made.
CHAPTER III
1860-1876
But poets should
Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively
As if afar they took their point of sight;
And distant things as intimately deep
As if they touched them....
I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his time.
MRS. BROWNING.--_Aurora Leigh._
... there are divine things, well envelop'd;
I swear to you, there are divine things more beautiful than
words can tell.--WALT WHITMAN, _Song of the Open Road_.
The morning skies were all aflame.--L.C.M.
Poetry with Mrs. Moulton was a serious art and an object of earnest
pursuit. It was not for mere pastime that she had steeped herself, so
to speak, in
... The old melodious lays
Which softly melt the ages through;
The songs of Spenser's golden days,
Arcadian Sidney's silver phrase;
for in her poetic work she recorded her deepest convictions and her
most intimate perceptions of the facts of life. To her life was love;
its essence was made up of the charm of noble and sincere friendships,
of happy social intercourse, of sympathetic devotion. To this joy of
love and friendship, there was in her mind opposed one sorrow--death,
and not all the assurances of faith or philosophy could eliminate this
dread, this all-pervading fear, that haunted her thoughts. In some way
the sadness of death, as a parting, had been stamped on her
impressionable nature, and it inevitably colored her outlook and made
itself a controlling factor in her character. It took the form,
however, of deepening her tenderness for every human relation and
widening her charity for all human imperfection. The vision of
Cold hands folded over a still heart,
touched her as it did Whittier, with the pity of humanity's common
sorrow, and with him she could have said that such vision
Swept all my pride away, and trembling I forgave.
Writing in later years of Stephen Phillips she said:
"Is it not, after all, the comprehension of love that above
all else makes a poet immortal? Who thinks of Petrarch
without remembering Laura, of Dante without the vision of
Beatrice?"
"I have said that Phillips is the poet of love and of pity.
Many poets have uttered the passionate cries of love; but
few, indeed, are those who have seen and expressed the
piteous tragedy of life as he has done. He says in
'Marpessa,'
"The half of music, I have heard men say,
Is to have grieved.
And not only has Phillips grieved, but he has felt the grief
of other men--listened to the wild, far wail which, one
sometimes feels, must turn the very joy of heaven to
sorrow."
These words reveal much of her own nature. One critic said aptly:
"She is penetrated with that terrible consciousness of the
futility of the life which ends in the grave--that
consciousness of personal transitoriness which has haunted
and oppressed so many passionate and despairing hearts. She
knows that 'there is no name, with whatever emphasis of
passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at
last.' And against this inevitable doom of humanity she
rebels with all the energy of her nature."
In her verse-loving girlhood she had delighted in the facile music and
the obvious sentiment of Owen Meredith; his "Aux Italiens," "Madame
la Marquise," and "Astarte" had delighted her fancy. As she developed,
Browning's "Men and Women" held her captive; and she responded with
eagerness to the new melodies of Swinburne. She was indeed wonderfully
sensitive to the charm of any master who might arise; yet her own work
seemed little influenced by others. She remained always strikingly
individual.
In the decades between 1860 and 1880 Boston was singularly rich in
rare individualities, and among them Mrs. Moulton easily and naturally
made her own place. She found the city not so greatly altered from the
Boston of the forties of which Dr. Hale remarked that "the town was so
small that practically everybody knew everybody. Lowell could discuss
with a partner in a dance the significance of the Fifth Symphony of
Beethoven in comparison with the lessons of the Second or the Seventh,
and another partner in the next quadrille would reconcile for him the
conflict of freewill and foreknowledge." At this period James Freeman
Clarke had founded his Church of the Disciples, of which he remained
pastor until 1888; and in 1869 Phillips Brooks became rector of
Trinity. Lowell, in these years, was living at Elmwood, and it was in
1869 that he recited at Harvard Commencement his great Commemoration
Ode. The prayer on that occasion was made by Mr. Brooks, and of it
President Eliot said that "the spontaneous and intimate expression of
Brooks' noble spirit convinced all Harvard men that a young prophet
had risen up in Israel."
Lydia Maria Child, the intimate friend of Whittier, Sumner, Theodore
Parker, and Governor Andrew, was then living, and in her book,
"Looking Toward Sunset," quoting a poem of Mrs. Moulton's from some
newspaper copy which had omitted the name of the author, Mrs. Child
had altered one line better to suit her own cheerful fancy. On Mrs.
Moulton's remonstrance Mrs. Child wrote her a characteristically
lovely note, but ended by saying: "I hope you will let me keep the
sunshine in it; the plates are now stereotyped, and an alteration
would be very expensive." Mrs. Moulton cordially assented to the added
"sunshine," and an affectionate intercourse continued between them
until Mrs. Child's death in 1880.
These years of the third quarter of the Nineteenth Century were the
great period of Webster, Choate, Everett, Channing, Sumner, and
Winthrop. With the close of the Civil War national issues shaped
themselves anew. It was a period of wonderful literary activity.
Thomas Starr King, who came to Boston in 1845, was a lecturer as well
as a preacher of power and genius. Henry James, the elder, was
publishing from time to time his philosophic essays, and to Mrs.
Moulton, who was much attracted by his gentle leadings, he gave in
generous measure his interest and encouragement. The _Atlantic
Monthly_ was founded in 1857 by Phillips and Sampson, the enterprising
young publishers who, according to Dr. Hale, inaugurated the
publishing business in Boston, and who were the publishers of Mrs.
Moulton's first book. With Lowell, the first editor of the _Atlantic_,
Mrs. Moulton came in contact in the easy intimacy of the literary
atmosphere. She heard with eager attention the well known lecture of
George William Curtis on "Modern Infidelity" in 1860; and in the same
year read with enthusiastic appreciation Hawthorne's "Marble Faun,"
from which she made copious extracts in her note-books with
sympathetic comments. The artistic and intellectual life of Boston in
those days held much to call out her keenest interest. Mrs. Kemble
gave her brilliant Shakespearian readings; Patti, a youthful prima
donna, delighted lovers of opera; Charles Eliot Norton invited
friends to see his new art treasure, a picture by Rossetti; Agassiz
was marking an epoch in scientific progress by his lectures.
Interested by Professor Agassiz's efforts to found a museum, Mrs.
Moulton wrote for the _New York Tribune_ a special article on the
subject; and this was acknowledged by Mrs. Agassiz.
_Mrs. Agassiz to Mrs. Moulton_
Thanks for the pleasant and appreciative article about the
Agassiz Museum in the _Tribune_. It is a good word spoken in
season. It is very charming, and so valuable just now, when
the institution is in peril of its life. No doubt it will be
of real service in our present difficulties by awakening
sympathy and affection in many people. Mr. Agassiz desires
his best regards to you.
Yours sincerely,
ELIZABETH CAREY AGASSIZ.
The intellectual and the social were closely blended in the Boston of
the sixties and the seventies, and Mrs. Moulton was in the very midst
of the most characteristically Bostonian circles. Her journals record
how she went to a "great party" given by Mrs. William Claflin, whose
husband was afterward governor; to Cambridge to a function given by
the Agassizs; to a reception at Dr. Alger's "to meet Rose Terry,"
later known as Rose Terry Cooke; to a dinner given in honor of Miss
Emily Faithful; to one intellectual gayety after another. She was one
of the attractive figures at the delightful Sunday evening reunions
given by Mr. and Mrs. Edwin P. Whipple. She notes in the journal that
at a brilliant reception given by Mrs. John T. Sargent, so well known
as the hostess of the famous Chestnut Street Radical Club, she had "a
few golden moments" with Emerson, and a talk with the elder Henry
James, with whom she was a favorite.
In 1870 Mrs. Moulton became the Boston literary correspondent of the
_New York Tribune_. This work developed under her care into one of
much importance. Boston publishers sent to her all books of especial
interest, and her comments upon them were of solid value. She recorded
the brilliant meetings of the Chestnut Street Radical Club, and the
intellectual news in general. These letters made a distinct success.
Extracts from them were copied all over the United States, and they
came to be looked upon as a sort of authorized report of what was
doing in the intellectual capital of the country. They were given up
only when the desire for foreign travel drew Mrs. Moulton so much
abroad that she could no longer keep as closely in touch with current
events as is necessary for a press correspondent.
The Radical Club at that time was famed throughout the entire country,
and it was regarded as the very inner temple wherein the gods forged
their thunderbolts. Only those who bore the sacramental sign were
supposed to pass its portals. Mrs. Moulton's accounts of these
meetings were vivid and significant. As, for instance, the following:
"The brightest sun of the season shone, and the balmiest
airs prevailed, on the 21st of December, in honor of the
meeting of the Radical Club under the hospitable roof of Mr.
and Mrs. John T. Sargent in Chestnut street. Mrs. Howe was
the essayist, and there was a brilliant gathering to hear
her. David Wasson was there, and John Weiss, and Colonel
Higginson, and Alcott, hoary embodiment of cool, clear
thought. Mr. Linton, the celebrated engraver, John Dwight of
the _Musical Journal_, Mrs. Severance, the beloved president
of the New England Woman's Club, bonny Kate Field of the
honest eyes and the piquant pen, Mrs. Cheney, Miss Peabody,
and many others, distinguished in letters or art.
"To this goodly company Mrs. Howe read a brilliant essay on
the subject of Polarity. She commenced by speaking of
polarity as applied to matter, in a manner not too abstruse
for the _savants_ who surrounded her, though it was too
philosophical and scholarly to receive the injustice of
being reported. The progress of polarity she found to give
us the division of sex; and Sex was the subject on which she
intended to write when she commenced the essay; but she
found it, like all fundamental facts in nature, to be an
idea with a history. In the pursuit of this history she
encountered the master agency of Polarity, and found herself
obliged to make that the primary idea, and consider sex as
derived from it."
Another letter, describing a meeting a few weeks later, gives a
glimpse at some of the women who frequented the club:
"There was Mrs. Severance, reminding one so much of an
Indian summer day, so calm and peaceful is the sweet face
that looks out at you from its framing of fair waving hair.
Not far away was Julia Ward Howe, who some way or other
makes you think of the old fairy story of the girl who never
opened her mouth but there fell down before her pearls and
diamonds. That story isn't a fairy story, not a bit of it.
It is real, genuine truth, and Mrs. Howe is the girl grown
up, and pearls of poetic fancy and diamonds of sparkling wit
are the precious stones which fall from her lips. Lucy Stone
was there, an attentive listener, looking the very picture
of retiring womanliness in her Quaker-like simplicity of
dress, and her pleasant face lighted with interest and
animation. Sitting by a table, busy with note-book and
pencil, was Miss Peabody, the Secretary of the Club. She has
a sparkling, animated face, brimming over with kindness and
good-will; she wins one strangely--you can't help being
drawn to her. There's a world of fun in the black eyes, and
you feel sure she would appreciate the ridiculous sides of
living as keenly as any one ever could."
In still another letter are these thumb-nail sketches of persons
well-known:
"As we drew near Chestnut street we saw a goodly number of
pilgrims.... Nora Perry, with the golden hair, had journeyed
up from Providence with a gull's feather in her hat and a
glint of mischief in her glance; Celia Thaxter, whom the
Atlantic naturally delights to honor, since from Atlantic
surges she caught the rhythm of her life, sat intent; Mr.
Alcott beamed approval; Professor Goodwin had come from
Harvard; David A. Wasson had left his bonded ware-house a
prey to smugglers; Rev. Dr. Bartol, who seems always to
dwell on the Mount of Vision; and Mr. Sanborn, who had
sheathed his glittering lance, sat near; Mrs. Howe, taking a
little vacation from her labors for women, listened
serenely; Miss Peabody had a good word to say for Aspasia;
and Mrs. Cheney quoted Walter Savage Landor's opinion of
her."
A racy letter tells of the meeting when the Club discovered Darwin;
another deals with the day when Mrs. Howe discoursed of "Moral
Trigonometry"; and yet another of an occasion when the Rev. Samuel
Longfellow was essayist, and all the pretty women had new bonnets.
This allusion reminds one of a bit of witty verse when "Sherwood
Bonner" (Mrs. McDowell) served up the Radical Club in a parody of
Poe's "Raven," and described Mrs. Moulton as,
"A matron made for kisses, in the loveliest of dresses."
The "Twelve Apostles of Heresy," as the transcendental thinkers were
irreverently termed by the wits of the press, were about this time
contributing to the enlightenment of the public by a series of Sunday
afternoon lectures. These lectures were held to represent the most
advanced thought of the day, and were delivered by such speakers as
the Rev. O.B. Frothingham, Mary Grew (Whittier's friend and a woman of
equally cultivated mind and lovely character), the Rev. John Weiss,
Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, T.W. Higginson, and Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney. In one
letter Mrs. Moulton writes thus:
"As the coffin of Mahomet was suspended between heaven and
earth, so is Mr. Wasson, who spoke last Sunday at
Horticultural Hall, popularly supposed to be suspended
between the heaven of Mr. Channing's serene faith and the
depths of Mr. Abbot's audacious heresy. But if any one
should infer from this statement that Mr. Wasson is a gentle
medium, a man without boldness of speculation, or
originality of thought, he would find he had never in his
life made so signal a mistake. Few men in America think so
deeply as David A. Wasson, and fewer still have so many of
the materials for thought at their command. He has a
presence of power, and is a handsome man, though prematurely
gray, with an expansive forehead, where strong thoughts and
calm judgment sit enthroned, and with eyes beneath it which
see very far indeed. His features are clearly cut, and he
looks as if he felt, and felt passionately, every word he
utters, as he stands before an audience, his subject well in
hand, and with always twice as much to say as his hour will
give space for, forced, therefore, against his will, to
choose and condense from his thronging thoughts. He spoke,
in the Sunday afternoon course, on 'Jesus, Christianity, and
Modern Radicalism.'"
John Weiss, the biographer of Theodore Parker, discoursed on one
occasion on "The Heaven of Homer," and Mrs. Moulton commented:
"Not the author of 'Gates Ajar,' listening in her pleasant
dreams to heavenly pianos, ever drew half so near to the
celestial regions, or looked into them with half so
disillusionized gaze as the Grecian thought of the time of
Homer."
Of Mary Grew Mrs. Moulton gave this pen-picture:
"We saw a woman not young, save with the youth of the
immortals; not beautiful, save with the beauty of the
spirit; but sweet and gentle, with a placid, earnest face.
Her own faith is so assured that she appeals fearlessly to
the faith of others; her nature so religious that her
religion seems a fact and not a question."
Another Boston institution of which Mrs. Moulton wrote in her
_Tribune_ letters was the New England Woman's Club. "Here," she
declared, "Mrs. Howe reads essays and poems in advance of their
publication; Abby May's wit flashes keen; Mrs. Cheney gives lovely
talks on art; and Kate Field, with the voice which is music, reads her
first lecture." She records how Emerson sends to the club-tea a poem;
how Whittier is sometimes a guest; how Miss Alcott tells an inimitable
story; and how on May 23, 1870, was celebrated the birthday of
Margaret Fuller, who for a quarter of a century had been beyond the
count of space and time. On this occasion the Rev. James Freeman
Clarke presided, and among the papers was a poem by Mrs. Howe of which
Mrs. Moulton quotes the closing stanza:
Fate dropt our Margaret
Within the bitter sea,
A pearl in golden splendor set
For spirit majesty.
It was in connection with a meeting of the Woman's Club that a guest
invited from New York wrote for a journal of that city an account of
the gathering in which is this description:
"There too was Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, looking for all
the world like one of her own stories, tender and yet
strong, the child-like curving of the mouth and chin in such
contrast with the tender, almost sad eyes and well-developed
brow covered with its masses of waving light hair."
Bret Harte, then in the height of his fame, wrote to Mrs. Moulton in
regard to her _Tribune_ letters, and told her that "it is woman's
privilege to assert her capacity as a critic without sacrificing her
charm as a woman." Many of her criticisms were richly worth
preservation, did space allow. Of Walt Whitman she said:
"With his theories I do not always agree; they seem to me
fitter for a larger, more sincere, less complex time than
ours; but there is no sham and no affectation, either in the
man or in his verse. I could not tell how strong was the
impression of sincerity and large-heartedness which he made
on me."
A new volume of poems by Lowell appeared, and in her comment she
wrote:
"Wordsworth was notably great in only a few poems, and
Coleridge, and Keats, and Shelley come under the same
limitations. Mr. Lowell is thus not alone in being at times
forsaken by his good genius.... If he does not furnish us
with a great amount of poetry of the highest order, it is
the simple truth to say that in his best he has no rival,
excepting Emerson, among American poets. When he is
inspired, the key to nature and to man is in his hand, and
he becomes the interpreter of both, commanding the secrets
of one as truly as he interprets the interior life of the
other."
All this newspaper work did not interfere with the steady production
of work less ephemeral. Poems and stories succeeded one another in
almost unbroken succession. The fecundity of Mrs. Moulton's mind was
by no means the least surprising of the good gifts with which nature
had endowed her. In all the leading American magazines her name held a
place recognized and familiar. What was apparently her first
contribution to the _Atlantic Monthly_, a poem called "May-Flowers,"
caught the popular fancy and became a general favorite. The exquisite
closing stanza was especially praised by those whose approbation was
best worth winning:
Tinted by mystical moonlight,
Freshened by frosty dew,
Till the fair, transparent blossoms
To their pure perfection grew.
Longfellow commended her perfection of form and the lyric spontaneity
of her verse and Whittier urged her to collect and publish her poems
in a volume.
Various letters of interest during these years from and to Mrs.
Moulton are as follows:
_Mr. Whittier to Mrs. Moulton_
AMESBURY, 3d, 8th month, 1870.
DEAR MRS. MOULTON: I am greatly disappointed in not meeting
the benediction of thy face when I called last month; but I
shall seek it again sometime. It just occurs to me that I
may yet have the pleasure of seeing thee under my roof at
Amesbury. We have so many friends in common that I feel as
if I knew thee through them.
How much I thank thee for thy kind note. It reaches me at a
time when its generous appreciation is very welcome and
grateful.
Believe me very truly thy friend,
JOHN G. WHITTIER.
_William Winter to Mrs. Moulton_
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.
November 8, 1875.
DEAR MRS. MOULTON: I accept with pleasure and gratitude your
very kind and sympathetic letter,--seeing beneath its
delicate and cordial words the sincere heart of a comrade
in literature, and the regard of a nature kindred with my
own. I wish I could think that your praise is deserved. It
has often seemed to me of late that there is no cheer in my
newspaper work.... I am aware, however, that the sympathy of
a bright mind and a tender heart and the approval of a
delicate taste are not won without some sort of merit, and
so I venture to find in your most genial and spontaneous
letter a ray of encouragement. You will scarcely know how
grateful this is to me at this time. I thank you and I shall
not forget that you were thoughtful and delicately kind.
To-day I have received a copy of Stedman's poems, which I
want to read again with great care. A man who has missed
poetic fame himself may find great satisfaction in the
success of his friend, and I do feel exceedingly glad in the
recognition that has come to Stedman. Your article on the
book in the _Tribune_ was excellent.
Faithfully yours,
WILLIAM WINTER.
_Mrs. Moulton to Mr. Stedman_
"When you say it depends on me whether I will be looked upon
as a real judicial authority by people of culture throughout
the land, you fire me with ambition, but my springing flame
is quenched by the realization that I am not cultured enough
to rely on my judgment as a certainty, a finality, and that
while I may feel that my intuitions are keen, they are apt
to be warped by my strong emotions. I'll try. A very few
persons are really my public, and I think how my letters
will strike them, rather than how the world will receive
them. I wonder how you will like my review of...? Much of
the book is 'splendidly null,'--perfect enough in execution,
but without that subtle something that sets the heart-chords
quivering, and fills the eyes with tender dew; that subtle
minor chord of being, to which we are all kin, by virtue of
our own pain...."
_Mrs. Moulton to Mr. Stedman_
"... I am impatient to see your article on Browning. I am so
struck by your calling him the greatest of love poets. I,
too, have often thought something like that of him. If 'The
Statue and the Bust' means anything, it means that Browning
thought the Duke and the Lady were fools to let 'I dare not'
wait upon 'I would.' But, _au contraire_, I think 'Pippa
Passes' gives one the impression that he considers illegal
love a great sin and the natural temptation to still greater
sins. Don't you think so? I wish I could have a talk on
social questions with you, for I think your ideas are more
fixed, more developed in thought and less chaotic than
mine...."
_Mr. Whittier to Mrs. Moulton_
AMESBURY, 11th month, 9th, 1874.
MY DEAR FRIEND LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON: I thank thee from my
heart for thy letter. I think some good angel must have
prompted it, for it reached me when I needed it; needed to
know that my words had not been quite in vain. And to know
that they have been comfort or strength to thee is a cause
for deep thankfulness. I do not put a very high estimate
upon my writings, in a merely literary point of view, but it
has been my earnest wish that they might at least help the
world a little. I read thy notice of my book in the
_Tribune_, in connection with Dr. Holmes' last volume, and
while very grateful for thy praise, I was saddened by a
feeling that I did not fully deserve it. In fact, I fear the
world has treated me far better than I had any reason to
expect; and I have been blessed with dear friends, whose
love is about me like an atmosphere.
I have read the little poem enclosed in thy letter with a
feeling of tenderest sympathy. God help us! The loneliness
of life, under even the best circumstances, becomes at times
appalling to contemplate. We are all fearfully alone; no one
human soul can fully know another, and an infinite sigh for
sympathy is perpetually going up from the heart of humanity.
But doubtless this very longing is the pledge and prophecy
and guarantee of an immortal destination. Perfect content is
stagnation and ultimate death.
Why does thee not publish thy poems? Everywhere I meet
people who have been deeply moved by them.
Thy letter dates from Pomfret, and I direct there to thee. I
was in that place once so long ago that thee must have been
a mere child. I rode over its rocky hills, bare in the chill
December, with the late William H. Burleigh. I think it must
be charming in summer and autumn. But something in thy poems
and in thy letter leads me to infer that thy sojourn there
has not been a happy one. Of course I do not speak of
unalloyed happiness, for that can only come of entire
exemption from sin and weakness. A passage which I have been
reading this morning from Thomas à Kempis has so spoken to
my heart that I venture to transcribe it:
"What thou canst not amend in thyself or others, bear with
patience until God ordaineth otherwise. When comfort is
taken away do not presently despair. Stand with an even
mind, resigned to the will of God, whatever may befall; for
after winter cometh the summer, after the dark night the day
shineth; and after the storm cometh a great calm."
Believe me always gratefully thy friend,
JOHN G. WHITTIER.
Religious questions, with which Mrs. Moulton was always deeply
concerned, come often into her letters. To Mr. Stedman she writes:
"I have been curiously interested of late about a band of
'Sanctificationists,' who believe Christ meant it when He
said, He can save from all sin. So they reason that,
trusting in His own words, they can be saved from sin now
and here. There is about them a peace and serenity, a
sweetness and light, a joy in believing, that is
unmistakable. They do live happier lives than others. I
cannot believe, somehow, in this 'cleansing blood,' yet,
seeing these people, I feel that I lose a great deal by not
believing in it. Oh, if one only knew the truth! Reason
rejects, it seems to me, the orthodox dogmas, but what is
one to do with the argument of holier lives?"
Unconsciously Mrs. Moulton was echoing Emerson's lines,
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
To the late sixties belongs a little incident which illustrates well
Mrs. Moulton's attitude toward society. She was fond of social life,
but it was in her interest always secondary to the intellectual.
During a visit to New York, she was one evening just dressed for a
festivity which she was to attend with her hostess, when the card of
Horace Greeley was brought to her. She went down at once, and Mr.
Greeley, who probably would not have noted any difference between a
ball-gown and a negligé did not in the least appreciate that she was
evidently dressed for a social function. When her hostess came to call
her, Mrs. Moulton signalled that she was to be left, and passed the
evening in conversation so interesting and so animated that Mr.
Greeley remained until an unusually late hour. Just as he was leaving
he seemed to become dimly conscious that her costume was especially
elaborate, and he inquired innocently:
"But were you not going somewhere to-night?"
"One does not go 'somewhere,'" she returned, "at the expense of
missing a conversation with Mr. Greeley."
In 1873 Mrs. Moulton published a volume for young folk entitled
"Bed-Time Stories." It was issued by Roberts Brothers, who from this
time until the dissolution of the firm in 1898, after the death of Mr.
Niles, remained her publishers. The success of the book was immediate,
and so great that the title was repeated in "More Bed-Time Stories,"
brought out in the year following. The first volume was dedicated to
her daughter in these graceful lines:
It is you that I see, my darling,
On every page of this book,
With your flowing golden tresses,
And your wistful, wondering look,
As you used to linger and listen
To the "Bed-time Stories" I told,
Till the sunset glory faded,
And your hair was the only gold.
Will another as kindly critic
So patiently hear them through?
Will the many children care for
The tales that I told to you?
You smile, sweetheart, at my question;
For answer your blue eyes shine:
"We will please the rest if it may be,
But the tales are--yours and mine."
Of the second series of "Bed-Time Stories" George H. Ripley wrote in
the _Tribune_:
"The entire absence of all the visible signs of art in the
composition of these delightful stories betrays a rare
degree of artistic culture which knows how to conceal
itself, or a singular natural bent to graceful and
picturesque expression. Perhaps both of these conditions
best explain the secret of their felicitous construction,
and their fidelity to nature. The best fruits of sweet
womanly wisdom she deems not too good for the entertainment
of the young souls with whom she cherishes such a cordial
sympathy, and whom she so graciously attracts by the silvery
music of her song, which lacks no quality of poetry but the
external form.... They inculcate no high-flown moral, but
inspire the noblest sentiments. There is no preaching in
their appeals, but they offer a perpetual incentive to all
that is lovely and good in character."
An equal success attended the collection of stories for older readers
which Mrs. Moulton brought out a year later under the title, "Some
Women's Hearts." This contained all the stories written since the
appearance of "My Third Book" which she thought worthy of
preservation, and may be said to represent her best in this order of
fiction. Professor Moses Coit Tyler said of them: "Mrs. Moulton has
the incommunicable tact of the story-teller"; commented on their
freedom from all padding, and commended their complete unity. The
instinct for literary form which was so strikingly conspicuous in her
verse showed itself in these stories by the excellence of arrangement
and proportion, the sincerity and earnestness which made the tales
vital. She had by this time outgrown the rather sentimental fashions
of the gift-book period of American letters, and her conscientious and
careful criticism of the work of others had resulted in a power of
self-criticism which was admirable in its results. "My best reward,"
she said in after years, "has been the friendships that my slight work
has won for me"; but by the time she was forty she had won a place in
American letters such as had been held by only two or three other
women, and before her was the reputation which she was to win abroad,
such as no woman of her country had ever attained before.
CHAPTER IV
1876-1880
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
TENNYSON.
The winds to music strange were set;
The sunsets glowed with sudden flame.--L.C.M.
Mrs. Moulton made her first visit to Europe in January, 1876. She
remained abroad for nearly two years. From that date until the summer
of 1907, inclusive, she passed every summer but two on the other side
of the Atlantic. London became her second home. Her circle of friends,
not only in England but on the Continent, became very wide. Her poems
were published in England, and she was accorded in London society a
place of distinction such as had not before been given to any American
woman of letters. She enjoyed her social opportunities; but she prized
most the number of sincere and interesting friendships which resulted
from them. It is not difficult to understand how her charm and
kindliness won those she met, or how her friendliness and sympathy
endeared her to all who came to know her well.
Mrs. Moulton's first glimpse of London was simply what could be had in
a brief pause on her way to Paris. She was, however, present in the
House of Lords when the Queen opened Parliament in person for the
first time after the death of the Prince Consort. She stayed but a few
days in Paris, and then hastened on to Rome. Mrs. Harriet Prescott
Spofford thus describes this first visit to the Immortal City:
"Paris over, came Rome, and twelve weeks of raptures and
ruins, of churches and galleries, old palaces and
almond-trees in flower, the light upon the Alban Hills, the
kindly, gracious Roman society, all like a dream from which
might come awaking. Certainly no one was ever made to feel
the ancient spell, or to enjoy its beauty more than this
sensitive, sympathetic, and impressible spirit. Stiff
Protestant as she is, she was touched to tears by the
benignant old pope's blessing; and she abandoned herself to
the carnival, as much a child as 'the noblest Roman of them
all.'"
Mrs. Moulton entered into the artistic life of Rome with
characteristic ardor. She knew many artists, and became an especial
friend of Story's, a visitor at his studio, and an admirer of his
sculpture.
"I had greatly liked many of his poems," she said later,
"and I was curious to see if his poems in marble equalled
them. I was more than charmed with his work; and I suppose I
said something which revealed my enthusiasm, for I remember
the smile--half of pleasure, half of amusement--with which
he looked at me. He said: 'You don't seem to feel quite as
an old friend of mine from Boston felt, when he went through
my studio, and, at least, I showed him the best I had. We
are all vain, you know; and I suppose I expected a little
praise, but my legal friend shook his head. "Ah, William,"
he said, "you might have been a great lawyer like your
father; you had it in you; but you chose to stay on here and
pinch mud!"' Another American sculptor whom Rome delighted
to honor is Mr. Richard S. Greenough, whose 'Circe' has more
fascination for me than almost anything else in modern art;
but my acquaintance with him came later. I had a letter of
introduction to William and Mary Howitt from Whittier; they
made me feel myself a welcome guest."
She was interested also in the work of a young sculptor who had then
lately arrived in Rome, Franklin Simmons; and of him she told this
incident:
"Mr. Simmons had almost completed a statue, for which he had
received an order from one of the States, had spent a great
deal of time and money, when a conception came to him higher
than his original idea. Without hesitation he sacrificed his
time, his labor, and his marble--no small loss this--and
began again. It was an act of simple heroism, of which not
every one would have been capable; and there is little doubt
that a man who unites to his talent a criticism so
unsparing, and a spirit so conscientious, will do work well
worthy the attention of the world."
Mrs. Moulton's real introduction to London did not come this year, but
in the summer of 1877, when a breakfast was given in her honor by Lord
Houghton (Richard Monckton Milnes), at which the guests included
Browning, Swinburne, George Eliot, Jean Ingelow, Gustave Doré, and
others of only less distinction. The breakfast was followed by a
reception at which, in the society phrase, the guest of honor met
everybody.
Of this breakfast an amusing reminiscence has been given by Mrs.
Moulton herself:
"Shortly after I came into the room, Lord Houghton, whose
voice was very low, brought a gentleman up to me whose name
I failed to hear. My fellow-guest had a pleasant face, and
was dressed in gray; he sat down beside me, and talked in a
lively way on everyday topics until Lord Houghton came to
take me in to table. Opposite to us sat Miss Milnes, now
Lady Fitzgerald, between two gentlemen, one of whom was the
man in gray. Presently Lord Houghton asked me if I thought
Browning looked like his pictures. 'Browning?' I asked.
'Where is he?' 'Why, there, sitting beside my daughter,' he
replied. But, as there were two gentlemen sitting beside
Miss Milnes, I sat during the remainder of the breakfast
with a divided mind, wondering which of these two men was
Browning. After going back to the drawing-room my friend in
gray again came and sat beside me, so I plucked up courage
and said, 'I understand Mr. Browning is here; will you
kindly tell me which he is?' He looked half puzzled, half
amused, for a moment; then he called out to some one
standing near, 'Look here, Mrs. Moulton wants to know which
one of us is Browning. _C'est moi!_' he added with a gay
gesture; and this is how my friendship with the author of
'Pippa Passes' began."
This introduction may be said to have "placed" Mrs. Moulton in English
literary society, and there was hardly a person of intellectual
distinction in London whom she did not meet. She came to know the
Rossettis, William Sharp, Theodore Watts (later known as
Watts-Dunton), Herbert E. Clarke, Mrs. W.K. Clifford, A. Mary F.
Robinson (afterward Mme. Darmesteter), Olive Schreiner, Lewis Morris,
William Bell Scott, the Hon. Roden Noel, Iza Duffus Hardy, Aubrey de
Vere, the Marstons, father and son, and in short almost every writer
worth knowing. She came, indeed, to belong almost as completely to the
London literary world as to that of America.
Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet, whose friend and biographer she
in time became, she first met on the first day of July of this year.
She has recorded the meeting:
"It was just six weeks before his twenty-sixth birthday. He
was tall, slight, and, in spite of his blindness, graceful.
He seemed to me young-looking even for his twenty-six years.
He had a noble and beautiful forehead. His brown eyes were
perfect in shape, and even in color, save for a dimness like
a white mist that obscured the pupil, but which you
perceived only when you were quite near to him. His hair and
beard were dark brown, with warm glints of chestnut; and the
color came and went in his cheeks as in those of a sensitive
girl. His face was singularly refined, but his lips were
full and pleasure-loving, and suggested dumbly how cruel
must be the limitations of blindness to a nature hungry for
love and for beauty. I had been greatly interested, before
seeing him, in his poems, and to meet him was a memorable
delight.
"He and the sister, who was his inseparable companion, soon
became my close friends, and with them both this friendship
lasted till the end."
The poetry of Swinburne had for her a fascination from the first, and
she was attracted also by the personality of the poet. Writing an
article upon a new volume of his, she submitted the copy to him before
publishing it in the _Athenæum_. His acknowledgment was as follows:
_Mr. Swinburne to Mrs. Moulton_
DECEMBER 19, 1877.
DEAR MADAME: I am sincerely obliged for the kindness and
courtesy to which I am indebted for the sight of the MS.
herewith returned. Of course my only feeling of hesitation
as to the terms in which I ought to acknowledge and answer
the application which accompanied it arises merely from a
sense of delicacy in seeming to accept, if not thereby to
endorse, an estimate altogether too flattering to the
self-esteem of its object.
But even at the risk of vanity or self-complacency, I will
simply express my gratitude for your too favourable opinion,
and my grateful sense of the delicacy and thoughtfulness
which has permitted me a sight of the yet unprinted pages
which convey it.
Yours sincerely,
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
Leaving London in August, 1876, Mrs. Moulton went with Kate Field to
visit Lawrence Hutton and his mother, who had a house for the summer
in Scotland. In September, in company with Dr. Westland Marston, his
son and daughter, and Miss Hardy, she made a visit to Étretat. The
place and the company made a combination altogether delightful. An
entry in her diary for this time, of which the date is merely
"Midnight of September 1," records her enthusiasm.
"I want to remember this evening which has been so
beautiful. I had worked all day to six o'clock dinner, after
which I sat and talked awhile with Cecily and Iza, and then
took a long moonlight walk with them and Dr. Marston. I
think I never saw such a wonderful sky. The blue of it was
so intensely blue and great masses of white clouds, hurried
and driven on by the wind, met each other and retreated and
put on all sorts of fantastic shapes, while among them the
moon walked, visible sometimes, and at others hiding her
pale face behind some veiled prophet of a cloud, who was
mocking the fair night with the gloom of his presence. I
never saw such grand effects.
"We climbed a long hill, and from thence we looked down on
little Étretat lying below us, with the lights in its many
windows, and the sea tossing beyond it white with spray and
with moonlight. The trees were quivering at the whispers of
a low wind, and still above all the clouds held strange
conclave, keeping up their swift march and counter-march.
All this time Dr. Marston talked as we sauntered on, and
talked superbly. I think the electricity in the air inspired
him. He talked of the soul's destiny, of immortality, and
expressed, with matchless eloquence, that strong-winged
faith which bears him on toward that end that will be, he
feels sure, the new life's beginning. From time to time he
interrupted himself to point out something that we might not
else have seen,--some wonderful phantom of moonlight, some
cottage-lamp shining at the end of a long lane, some
Rembrandt contrast of light and shade.
"We walked far, but I knew no weariness. I could have walked
on forever watching that strange and fitful sky, and
listening to such talk as I have seldom heard. Here is an
affluent poet, who affords to scatter his riches broadcast,
and does not save them all for his printed pages. We went
home at last and sat for a while in Dr. Marston's house, and
then Philip and Cecily and I went down to the long terrace
overlooking the sea, and sat for an hour or more to watch
the moonlight on the breaking waves. How happy we were, that
little while! We talked of the fitful clouds, the wild,
hurrying sea, the white, sweet moon. Then something brought
back to me visions of the white statues at Rome, and I
tried to show them how fair these old gods stood in my
memory. Ah! shall I ever forget this so lovely night? The
strange, changeful, wind-swept sky, the waves swollen with
the passion of yesterday's storm, marching in like a strong
army upon the shore and overwhelming it. Behind us the
casino, with its many lights, and down there between the
moonlight and the sea, we three who did not know each other
three months ago but hold each other so closely now.
"Nothing can ever take from me the fitful splendor, the wild
rhythm, the divine mystery of this happy night. I can always
close my eyes and see again sea and sky and dear faces; hear
again the waves break on this wild coast of Normandy, with
the passion of their immortal pain and longing."
This stay in Étretat was further commemorated in her poem of that
title. Dr. Marston, too, felt the spell of the place and company, and
addressed to her this sonnet:
THE EMBALMING OF A DAY.
TUESDAY: SEPTEMBER 11: 1877. TO LOUISE.
A Day hath Lived! So let him fall asleep.
A Day is Dead--Days are not born again.
Only his Spirit shall for Us remain
Who found Him dear: His Hours in Balm to steep
Of all sweet Thoughts that may in Freshness keep
The beauty of a Day forever slain--
Of Wishes, for the bitter Herbs of Pain:
Of Looks that meet and smile, though Hearts may weep.
So shall our Night to come not wholly prove
An Egypt's Feast, where bids the Silent Guest
"In Joy remember Death."--"Remember Love
In Death," thy dead Day breathes from Breast to Breast.
Embalm Him thus, Heart's Love, that he may lie
Untombed and unforgotten, though he die.
The succeeding winter Mrs. Moulton passed in Paris. Here as in London
she met many of the most interesting people of the day. With Stéphane
Mallarmé especially she formed a close friendship, and through him she
came to know the chief men of the group called at that time the
"_Décadents_" of which he was the leader. Mallarmé was at this time
professor of English in a French college, and his use of that language
afforded Mrs. Moulton some amusement. "He always addressed me in the
third person," she related, "and he made three syllables of
'themselves.' He spoke of useless things as 'unuseful.' He was,
however, a great comfort and pleasure to me, and I saw a great deal of
him and of his wife that winter. I used to dine with them at their
famous Tuesdays, and meet the adoring throng that came in after
dinner. Often he and Madame Mallarmé would saunter with me about the
streets of Paris. It was then that I first made acquaintance with the
French dolls,--those wonderful creations which can bow and courtesy
and speak, and are so much better than humans that they always do the
thing they should. Whenever we came to a window where one of these
lovely creatures awaited us, I used to insist upon stopping to make
her dollship's acquaintance, until I fear the Mallarmés really
believed that these dolls were the most alluring things in life to me.
But the winter,--crowded for me with the deepest interests and
delights in meeting the noted men of letters and many of the greatest
artists, and of studying that new movement in art, Impressionism,
which was destined to be so revolutionary in its influence,--at last
this wonderful winter came to an end, and I was about to cross the
Channel once more. Full of kindly regrets came Monsieur and Madame
Mallarmé to pay me a parting call. 'We have wishéd,' began the poet,
mustering his best English in compliment to the occasion, 'Madame and
I have wishéd to make to Madame Moulton a souvenir for the good-bye,
and we have thought much, we have consideréd the preference beautiful
of Madame, so refinéd; and we do reflect that as Madame is pleaséd to
so graciously the dolls of Paris like, we have wishéd to a doll
present her. Will Madame do us the pleasure great to come out and
choose with us a doll, _très jolie_, that may have the pleasure to
please her?'"
It would be a pleasure to record that Mrs. Moulton accepted the gift.
The doll presented by the leader of the Symbolists would have been not
only historic, but it might have been regarded as signifying in the
language of symbolism things unutterable; but she could only say: "Oh,
no; please. I should be laughed at. Please let it be something else."
And the guests retired pensive, to return next day with a handsome
Japanese cabinet as their offering. "And I have pined ever since,"
Mrs. Moulton added smilingly, when she told the story, "for the
Mallarmé doll that might have been mine."
In 1877 the Macmillans brought out Mrs. Moulton's first volume of
poems under the title "Swallow Flights," the name being taken from
Tennyson's well known lines:
Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away.
The American edition, which followed soon after from the house of
Roberts Brothers, was entitled simply "Poems." The success of the
book was a surprise to the author. Professor William Minto wrote in
the _Examiner_:
"We do not, indeed, know where to find, among the works of
English poetesses, the same self-controlled fulness of
expression with the same depth and tenderness of simple
feeling.... 'One Dread' might have been penned by Sir Philip
Sidney."
The _Athenæum_, always chary of overpraise, declared:
"It is not too much to say of these poems that they exhibit
delicate and rare beauty, marked originality, and perfection
of style. What is still better, they impress us with a sense
of subtle and vivid imagination, and that spontaneous
feeling which is the essence of lyrical poetry.... A poem
called 'The House of Death' is a fine example of the
writer's best style. It paints briefly, but with ghostly
fidelity, the doomed house, which stands blind and voiceless
amid the light and laughter of summer. The lines which we
print in italics show a depth of suggestion and a power of
epithet which it would be difficult to surpass.
"THE HOUSE OF DEATH
"Not a hand has lifted the latchet,
Since she went out of the door,--
No footsteps shall cross the threshold,
Since she can come in no more.
"There is rust upon locks and hinges,
And mould and blight on the walls,
_And silence faints in the chambers_,
_And darkness waits in the halls_,--
"Waits, as all things have waited,
Since she went, that day of spring,
Borne in her pallid splendour,
To dwell in the Court of the King;
"With lilies on brow and bosom,
With robes of silken sheen,
_And her wonderful frozen beauty_
_The lilies and silk between_....
"_The birds make insolent music_
_Where the sunshine riots outside_;
And the winds are merry and wanton,
With the summer's pomp and pride.
"But into this desolate mansion,
Where Love has closed the door,
Nor sunshine nor summer shall enter,
Since she can come in no more."
Philip Bourke Marston wrote a long review of the volume in _The
Academy_, London, in the course of which he admirably summarized the
merits of the work when he said:
"The distinguishing qualities of these poems are extreme
directness and concentration of utterance, unvarying harmony
between thought and expression, and a happy freedom from
that costly elaboration of style so much in vogue.... Yet,
while thus free from elaboration, Mrs. Moulton's style
displays rare felicity of epithet.... The poetical faculty
of the writer is in no way more strongly evinced than by the
subtlety and suggestiveness of her ideas."
The reviewers of note on both sides of the Atlantic were unanimous in
their praise. In a time of æsthetic imitation she came as an
absolutely natural singer. She gave the effect of the sudden note of a
thrush heard through a chorus of mocking-birds and piping bullfinches.
She was able to put herself into her work and yet to keep her poetry
free from self-consciousness; and to be at once spontaneous and
impassioned is given to few writers of verse. When such a power
belongs to an author the verse becomes poetry.
Mrs. Moulton had already come to regard Robert Browning as, in her own
phrase, "king of contemporary poets." She sent to him a copy of
"Swallow Flights," with a timid, graceful note asking for his
generosity. In his acknowledgment he said:
_Mr. Browning to Mrs. Moulton_
19 WARWICK CRESCENT, W.
February 24, '78.
MY DEAR MRS. MOULTON: Thank you for the copy of the poems.
They need no generosity.... I close it only when needs I
must at page the last, with music in my ears and flowers
before my eyes, and not without thoughts across the brain.
Pray continue your "flights," and be assured of the
sympathetic observation of
Yours truly,
ROBERT BROWNING.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF A LETTER FROM ROBERT BROWNING]
In acknowledgment of a copy of "In the Garden of Dreams" William
Winter wrote:
_Mr. Winter to Mrs. Moulton_
"It is a beautiful book, Louise, and the spirit of it is
tender, dreamlike and sorrowful.... The pathos of it affects
me strongly. Life appeals more strongly to you than the
pageantry. There is more fancy in your poems and more
alacrity and variety of thought, but the quality that
impresses me is feeling. I am not a critic, but somehow I
must feel that I know a good thing when I see it, and I am
sure that no one but a true artist in poetry could have
written those stanzas called 'Now and Then.' The music has
been running in my mind for days and days,
"And had you loved me then, my dear.
I think you are very kind to remember me and to send such a
lovely offering to me at Christmas. God bless you! and may
this new year be happy for you, and the harbinger of many
happier years to follow."
Some years later the Scotch critic, Professor Meiklejohn, sent to Mrs.
Moulton a series of comments which he had made while reading "Swallow
Flights," "in the intervals of that fearful kind of business called
Examination;" and some of these may be quoted before the book is
passed for other matters.
"The word 'waiting' in the line
'White moons made beautiful the waiting night,'
is full of emotional and imaginative memory.
"In 'A Painted Fan' the line
'The soft, south wind of memory blows,'
is another instance of a perfect poetical thought, perfectly
expressed.
"Two lines of an unforgettable beauty are
'The flowers and love stole sweetness from the sun;
The short, sweet lives of summer things are done.'
"And a line Shelley himself might have been proud to own is
'No bird-note quivers on the frosty air.'
"The lines
'He must, who would give life,
Be lord of death:'
and
'Shall a life which found no sun
In death find God?'
express musically a mystic thought.
"The sonnet 'In Time to Come' is one of astonishing
crescendo. The lines
'And you sit silent in the silent place, ...
You will be weary then for the dead days,
And mindful of their sweet and bitter ways,
Though passion into memory shall have grown.'
"This is very poetry of very poetry. You must look for your
poetic brethren among the noble lyrists of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Your insight, your subtlety, your
delicacy, your music, are hardly matched, and certainly not
surpassed, by Herrick or Campion or Carew or Herbert or
Vaughan."
The success of this first volume of poems naturally contributed not a
little toward establishing Mrs. Moulton firmly in the place she had
won already in the literary society of London. Among other celebrities
she met at this time Lady Wilde, who, as the poet "Speranza" in the
_Dublin Nation_ in 1848 had been a figure really heroic, and who was
by no means disinclined to magnify her own virtues. Taking Mrs.
Moulton to task as a poet of mere emotion, Lady Wilde said to her
reprovingly: "You're full of your own feelin's, me dear; but when I
was young and your age, too, only the Woes of Nations got utterance in
me pomes."
Mrs. Moulton heard Cardinal Newman and Mr. Spurgeon. Of them she
wrote:
"You see straight into his [Newman's] mind and heart. You
feel the glow of his thought, the action of his conscience;
you feel the inherent excellence of the man you are dealing
with.
"Mr. Spurgeon's style is admirable--strong, vigorous Saxon,
short sentences, simple in structure, and full of
earnestness. His first prayer was brief and earnest, and
extremely simple in phraseology. It gave one a sense of
intimacy with God, in which was no irreverence. The sermon
commenced at 12 M., and lasted three-quarters of an hour. I
thought John Bunyan might have preached just such a
discourse."
To her great regret she missed meeting Tennyson. Long afterward she
wrote:
"I never met Tennyson, but I just lost him by an accident. I
shall never get over the regret of it. I had been invited to
various places where he was expected as a guest; but you
know how elusive he was, even his best friends could get at
him but rarely. One day I had gone out for some idiotic
shopping--shopping is always idiotic to me--and when I came
back at late dinner time Lord Houghton met me with the
question, 'Where have you been? I've been sending messengers
all over the city for you. I got hold of Tennyson, and he
waited for half an hour to see you.' The fates were never
kind enough to bring me within the poet's range again."
On the death of Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman in 1878, Mrs. Moulton wrote
of her in the London _Athenæum_. The admiration of Poe which exists in
England, the romance of his relations with the "Helen" of his most
beautiful poem, made the article especially timely; and from her
acquaintance and her warm friendship for Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Moulton
was able to speak with authority. Her description of the personality
of Mrs. Whitman is noteworthy:
"There was a singular attraction in the personal presence of
this woman. The rooms where she lived habitually were full
of her. They were dim, shadowy rooms, rich in tone, crowded
with objects of interest, packed with the memorials of a
lifetime of friendships; but she herself was always more
interesting than her surroundings. When she died, her soft
brown hair was scarcely touched with gray. Her voice
retained to the last its music, vibrating at seventy-five
with the sympathetic cadences of her youth. She was
singularly shy. I remember that when I persuaded her to
repeat to me one of her poems, she always insisted on going
behind me. She could not bring herself to confront eye and
ear at the same time."
The letters of Mrs. Whitman to Mrs. Moulton have been published in the
biography of the former, but the following is so unusual--"the lady's
gentle vexation at having been made out younger than she was,"
commented the recipient of the letter; "is so exceptional among women
as to be amusing"--that it may be quoted.
_Mrs. Whitman to Mrs. Moulton_
"I will speak of one or two points suggested by the
expression, 'true to her early love for Edgar Poe.' Now I
was first _seen_ by Edgar Poe in the summer of 1845, when I
was forty-two years old, and my earliest introduction to him
was in 1848, when I was forty-five. You will see, therefore,
that it was rather a _late_ than an _early_ love. I was born
on the 19th of January, 1803--Edgar Poe was born on the 19th
of January, 1809, being six years, to a day, my junior. Soon
after the last edition of Griswold's 'Female Poets' was
issued, I happened to be turning over some of the new
Christmas books at a bookseller's, when I unwittingly opened
a copy of that work, at the very page where an alert,
enterprising woman sits perched on a marble pedestal.
Glancing at the foot of the page, I read, in blank
amazement, my own name. Turning to the preceding page, I
found that the lady in question was born in 1813! I began
seriously to doubt my own identity. I had never, to the best
of my recollection, been modelled in plaster; I had never
been 'interviewed' on the delicate point of age. Everybody
knows that a lady's age after forty is proverbially
uncertain; still it is as well to draw a line somewhere, and
so, dear, if you should be called upon to write my obituary,
and should consent to do so, here is a faithful transcript
from the family Bible:--
"'Sarah Helen Power, born Jan. 19--10 o'clock P.M., 1803.'
"That was the same year that gave birth to Emerson."
Mr. Longfellow wrote to thank Mrs. Moulton for her paper on Mrs.
Whitman, and at no great interval he wrote again in acknowledgment of
an article upon his own poetry also in the _Athenæum_.
_Mr. Longfellow to Mrs. Moulton_
CAMBRIDGE, May 17, 1879.
DEAR MRS. MOULTON: For your kind words in the _Athenæum_,
how shall I thank you? Much, certainly, and often,--but more
and more for your kind remembrance, and the pleasant hours
we passed together before your departure.
... A charming country place in England is the
thatched-roofed Inn at Rowsley in Derbyshire, one mile from
Haddon Hall. Go there. And do not forget to write to me.
Truly yours,
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.
In October, 1879, Mr. Chandler died, and Mrs. Moulton's grief was
sincere and deep. It was the beginning of the breaking of the
relations which had been closest in her life. Her love for her father
had been always tender and fine, and both her journal and her letters
show how much she felt the loss.
[Illustration: LUCIUS LEMUEL CHANDLER, MRS. MOULTON'S FATHER
_Page 104_]
She was in America at the time of her father's death, and in
correspondence with many of the friends she had made abroad. Among her
Christmas gifts this year came a sonnet from Dr. Westland Marston.
_To L.C.M._
Take thou, as symbol of thyself, this rose
Which blooms in our world's winter.
Dank and prone
Lie rose-stems now, by sleety gales o'erthrown,
But still thy flower in hall and chamber glows,
Fed, like thee, not by airs the garden knows,
But by a subtler climate. Thus the zone
Of Summer binds the seasons, one to one,
And links the beam which dawns with that which goes.
Hail, Human Rose!--With heavenly fires enshrined,
Still cheat worn hearts anew in fond surprise
To faith in Youth's dear, dissipated skies;
Soul-flower, still shed thine influence!
Sun nor wind
Control not thee; thy life thy charm supplies
And makes the beauty which it does not find.
W.M.
_Christmas Eve._
CHAPTER V
1880-1890
The busy shuttle comes and goes
Across the rhymes, and deftly weaves
A tissue out of autumn leaves,
With here a thistle, there a rose.
With art and patience thus is made
The poet's perfect Cloth of Gold;
When woven so, nor earth nor mould
Nor time can make its colors fade.--T.B. ALDRICH.
And others came,--Desires and Adorations;
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies;
Splendors and Glooms and glimmering Incantations
Of hopes and fears and twilight fantasies.--SHELLEY.
I see the Gleaming Gates and toward them press.--L.C.M.
Mr. and Mrs. Moulton when they first set up their household gods
established themselves on Beacon Hill. A few years later, however, a
new part of the city was developed at the South End, and popular favor
turned in that direction. The broad streets and squares with trees and
turf were quiet and English-looking, and although fickle fashion has
in later years forsaken the region, it remains singularly attractive.
Here Mr. Moulton became the owner of a house, and for the remainder of
their lives he and his wife made this their home.
The dwelling was a four-story brick house, the front windows looking
out upon the greenery of a little park in the centre of the square. At
one end of the place was a stone church, defined against the sky and
especially lovely with the red of sunset behind it; and an old-world
atmosphere of retirement and leisure always pervaded the region. In
Rutland Square, No. 28 came to be well known to every Bostonian and to
whomever among visitors was interested in things literary. It was the
most cosmopolitan centre of social life in the city; and to it famous
visitors to this country were almost sure to find their way. For
thirty years Mrs. Moulton's weekly receptions through the winter were
notable.
The drawing-room and library where groups of charming and famous
people assembled were such as to remain pictured in the memory of the
visitor. They were fairly furnished, so to speak, with the tributes of
friends. There were water-colors from Rollin Tilton of Rome; a
vigorous sketch of a famous group of trees at Bordighera by Charles
Caryl Coleman; a number of signed photographs from Vedder; sketches in
clay from Greenough, Ezekiel, and Robert Barrett Browning; a group of
water-colors, illustrating Mrs. Moulton's poem, "Come Back, Dear
Days," by Winthrop Pierce,--one of these showing a brilliant sunrise,
while underneath was the line,
"The morning skies were all aflame;"
and another, revealing a group of shadow-faces, illustrated the line,
"I see your gentle ghosts arise."
There were signed photographs of Robert Barrett Browning's "Dryope," a
gift from the artist; a painting of singular beauty from the artist,
Signor Vertunni, of Rome; and from William Ordway Partridge three
sculptures,--the figure of a child in Carrara marble, a head tinted
like old ivory, and a portrait bust of Edward Everett Hale, a speaking
likeness. There was that wonderful drawing by Vedder, "The Cup of
Death" (from the Rubaiyat), which the artist had given to Mrs. Moulton
in memory of her sonnet on the theme, the opening lines of which
are:
She bends her lovely head to taste thy draught,
O thou stern "Angel of the Darker Cup,"
With thee to-night in the dim shades to sup,
Where all they be who from that cup have quaffed.
And among the rare books was a copy of Stéphane Mallarmé's translation
of Poe's "Raven," with illustrations by Manet, the work being the
combined gift to Mrs. Moulton of the poet-translator and the artist.
[Illustration: THE LIBRARY IN MRS. MOULTON'S BOSTON HOME, 28 RUTLAND
SQUARE
_Page 109_]
Many were the rare books in autograph copies given to Mrs. Moulton by
her friends abroad--copies presented by Lord Houghton, George Eliot,
Tennyson, Jean Ingelow, Christina Rossetti, Oswald Crawfurd, George
Meredith, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, and several,
too, which were dedicated to her,--the "Wind Voices" of Philip Bourke
Marston, inscribed: "To Louise Chandler Moulton, true poet and true
friend," and another by Herbert L. Clarke of London. The rooms were
magnetic with charming associations.
A correspondent from a leading New York daily, commissioned to write
of Mrs. Moulton's home, described her drawing-room as
"Long, high, and altogether spacious and dignified. A
library opening from the rear increases the apparent length
of the apartment, so that it is a veritable salon; the
furnishings are of simple elegance in color and design, and
the whole scheme of decoration quiet and not ultra-modern.
"But in this attractive room are more treasures than one
would dream of at first glance. The fine paintings that are
scattered here, there, and everywhere, are all of them
veritable works of art, presented to Mrs. Moulton by their
painters; the etchings are autograph copies from some of the
best masters of Europe. Almost every article of decoration,
it would seem, has a history. The books that have overflowed
from the dim recesses of the library are mostly presentation
copies in beautiful bindings, with many a well-turned phrase
on their fly leaves written by authors we all know and love.
"There could be no better guide through all this
treasure-house of suggestive material than Mrs. Moulton
herself. Without question she knows more English people of
note than does any other living American. As she spreads out
before the delighted caller her remarkable collection of
presentation photographs, she intersperses the exhibit with
brilliant off-hand descriptions of their originals--the sort
of word-painting that bookmen are eager to hear in
connection with their literary idols. It is the real
Swinburne she brings to the mind's eye, with his
extraordinary personal appearance and his weird manners; the
real William Watson, profoundly in earnest and varying in
moods; the real George Egerton, with her intensity and
devotion to the higher rights of womankind; the real Thomas
Hardy and George Meredith and Anthony Hope, and the whole
band of British authors, big and little, whom she marshals
in review and dissects with unerring perception and the
keenest of wit. Anecdotes of all these personages flow from
her tongue with a prodigality that makes one long for the
art of shorthand to preserve them."
From this home in the early eighties the daughter of the house was
married to Mr. William Henry Schaefer, of Charleston, South Carolina.
In her daughter's removal to that Southern city, Mrs. Moulton's life
found an extension of interests. She made frequent visits to
Charleston before what now came to be her annual spring sailings to
Europe. In her later years Mrs. Moulton and her daughter and
son-in-law often travelled together, though Mrs. Moulton's enjoyment
centred itself more and more, as the years went by, in her extensive
and sympathetic social life. Always was she pre-eminently the poet
and the friend; and travel became to her the means by which she
arrived at her desired haven, rather than was indulged in for its own
sake. Yet the lovely bits of description which abound in her writings
show that she journeyed with the poet's eye; as, for instance, this on
leaving Rome:
"The deep blue Italian sky seemed warm with love and life,
the fountains tossed high their white spray and flashed in
the sunshine. Peasants were milking their goats at the foot
of the Spanish Steps. Flower-girls had their arms full of
fresh flowers, with the dew still on them, loading the air
with fragrance."
Or this of Florence:
"I never cross the Ponte Vecchio, or Jewellers' Bridge, in
Florence, without thinking of Longfellow's noble sonnet, and
quoting to myself:
'Taddeo Gaddi built me,--I am old.'
Nor could I ever approach the superb equestrian statue of
the Grand Duke Ferdinand without thinking of Browning's 'The
Statue and the Bust.' 'The passionate pale lady's face'
wrought by Lucca della Robbia no longer 'watches it from the
square.'"
Just before her sailing in 1880 came this note from Mr. Longfellow:
_Mr. Longfellow to Mrs. Moulton_
CRAIGIE HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, March 2, 1880.
DEAR MRS. MOULTON: ... Yes, surely I will give you a letter
to Lowell. I will bring it to you as soon as I am able to
leave the house.... It was a great pleasure to meet you at
Mrs. Ole Bull's, but I want to hear more about your visits
to England, and whom you saw, and what you did. What is it?
Is it the greater freedom one feels in a foreign country
where no _Evening Transcript_ takes note of one's outgoings
and incomings? I can't attempt to explain it. Please don't
get expatriated.
Ah, no, life is not all cathedrals and ruined castles, and
other theatrical properties of the Old World. It is not all
scenery, and within the four walls of home life is much the
same everywhere.
Truly yours,
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.
Of cathedrals and ruins she saw much, but people always interested her
more than any inanimate things. She records her talks with one and
another of the intellectual friends whom she met now in one city and
now in another. She records, for instance, a talk with Miss Anne
Hampton Brewster, so long the Roman correspondent of the _Boston
Advertiser_, the topic being the poetry of Swinburne. "She regarded
his 'Laus Veneris' as the most fearful testimony against evil she ever
read," Mrs. Moulton wrote; "and in 'Hesperia,' that glorious,
beautiful, poetic cry, she declared could be found the way to the
poet's meaning."
She visited the Roman studios, and in that of Mr. Story saw the busts
of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, and others, and the statue of
"Medea," just then completed. She wrote later that the concluding ten
lines of Swinburne's "Anactoria" "express the character of Story's
'Sappho.' It is as if the poem had been written for the statue, or the
statue was modelled to interpret the poem."
One result of her travels was the publication in 1881 of a charming
little collection of papers called "Random Rambles." The book
contained short chapters about Rome and Paris and Genoa and Florence
and Venice and Edinburgh and the London parks. A reviewer
characterized the volume aptly when he said:
"Mrs. Moulton seems to have gathered up the poetic threads
of European life which were too fine for other visitors to
see or get, to have caught and given expression to the
impalpable aromas of the various places she visited, so that
the reader feels a certain atmospheric charm it is
impossible to describe."
The little book was deservedly successful. Mrs. Moulton's writings
seemed always to conform to the standard set by Mr. Aldrich, who once
said to her: "Literature ought to warm the heart; not chill it." Her
readers were conscious without fail of a current of sympathetic
humanity.
It was this quality no less than her real critical power, or perhaps
even more than that, which made authors so grateful for her reviews of
their work. In reference to a newspaper letter in which she had spoken
of Wilkie Collins, the novelist wrote to her:
_Mr. Collins to Mrs. Moulton_
"90 GLOUCESTER PLACE, PORTMAN SQUARE, W.
March 30, 1880.
"I have read your kind letter with much pleasure. I know the
'general reader' by experience as my best friend and
ally.... When I return to the charge I shall write with
redoubled resolution if I feel that I have the great public
with me, as I had then (for example) in the case of 'The New
Magdalen.' 'Her Married Life,' in the second part, will be
essentially happy. But the husband and wife--the world whose
unchristian prejudices and law they set at defiance will
slowly undermine their happiness, and will, I fear, make the
close of the story a sad one."
The letter referred to was one of a long series which Mrs. Moulton
contributed to the _New York Independent_. Many of these papers were
of marked literary value. A typical one was upon Mme. Desbordes-Valmore,
founded upon Sainte Beuve's memoir of that interesting and unhappy
French poet. Mrs. Moulton characterizes Mme. Desbordes-Valmore as "the
sad, sweet nightingale among the singers of France, and as a tender,
elegiac poet" without equal. She closes with these words:
"Mme. Valmore passed away in July of 1859. 'We shall not
die,' she had said. In that hour a gate was opened to some
strange land of light, some new dawning of glory, and the
holy saints, to whose fellowship she belonged, received her
into the very peace of God."
Mrs. Moulton's witty essay on "The Gospel of Good Gowns" was one of
this series in _The Independent_, and a fine paper of hers on Thoreau
was widely quoted.
In a department which for some months she conducted under the title,
"Our Society," in a periodical called _Our Continent_, Mrs. Moulton
discoursed on manners, morals, and other problems connected with the
conduct of life. The incalculable influence of the gentle, refined
ideals that she persuasively imaged was a signal factor in the
progress of life among the younger readers. Mrs. Moulton's ideal of
the importance of manner was that of Tennyson's as expressed in his
lines,--
For manners are not idle, but the fruit
Of loyal nature and of noble mind.
Many of these papers are included in Mrs. Moulton's book called
"Ourselves and Our Neighbors," published in 1887. In one of these on
"The Gospel of Charm" she says:
"So many new gospels are being preached, and that so
strenuously, to the girls and women of the twentieth
century, that I have wondered if there might not be a danger
lest the Gospel of Charm should be neglected. And yet to my
mind there are few teachings more important. I would
advocate no charm that was insincere, none that would
lessen the happiness of any other woman; but the fact
remains that the slightest act may be done with a
graciousness that warms the day, or with a hard indifference
that almost repels us from goodness itself. It is possible
to buy a newspaper or pay a car-fare in such wise as to make
newsboy or car-conductor feel for the moment that he is in a
friendly world."
Certainly the "gospel of charm" never had a more signal illustration
than in her own attitude toward those with whom she came in contact.
In one of the chapters, "The Wish to Rise," she writes:
"The moment a strong desire for social advancement seizes on
a man or woman it commences to undermine the very
foundations of character, and great shall be the fall
thereof. 'To keep up appearances,' 'to make a show'--one of
these sentences is only more vulgar than the other. The
important thing is not to appear, but to be. It is true, and
pity 'tis, 'tis true, that many people are shut out by
limited and narrow fortunes from the society to which by
right of taste and culture they should belong. But nothing
proves more surely that they do not belong there than any
attempt to force their way there by means of shams.... If
our steady purpose is, each one, to raise himself, his own
mind and spirit, to the highest standard possible for him,
he will not only be too busy to pursue shams and shadows,
but he will be secure of perpetual good society, since he
will be always with himself.... Nothing more surely
indicates the parvenu than boastfulness. The man who brings
in the name of some fine acquaintance at every turn of the
conversation is almost certain to be one whose acquaintance
with any one who is fine is of yesterday. Really well-placed
people do not need to advertise their connections in this
manner.... It is essentially vulgar to push--to run after
great people, or to affect a style of living beyond one's
means--it is not only vulgar but contemptible to change
one's friends with one's bettering fortunes."
The book had a merited success, and even yet is in demand.
In the early eighties an enterprising publisher conceived the idea of
a book on "Famous Women," in which those exceptional beings should
write of each other. To Mrs. Moulton's pen fell Louisa M. Alcott, and
a request on her part for information brought to her the following
characteristic note, dated January, 1883:
_Miss Alcott to Mrs. Moulton_
"I have not the least objection to your writing a sketch of
L.M.A. I shall feel quite comfortable in your hands. I have
little material to give you; but in 'Little Women' you will
find the various stages of my career and experience. Don't
forget to mention that I don't like lion hunters, that I
don't serve autophotos and biographies to the hundreds of
boys and girls who ask, and that I heartily endorse Dr.
Holmes' views on this subject."
To this volume the sketch of Mrs. Moulton herself was written by the
graceful pen of Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, who wrote with the
sympathetic appreciation of the poet and close friend.
While on a visit to Spain in 1883,--and "Spain," she wrote, "is a word
to conjure with,"--Mrs. Moulton made the acquaintance of Oswald
Crawfurd the novelist, when he was in the diplomatic service. From his
letters then and afterward might be taken many interesting passages,
of which the following may serve as examples:
"There is another writer whose acquaintance I have made,
through his books, I mean, for such interesting creatures as
authors seldom come to Portugal. We have to put up with
royalties, rich tourists, and wine merchants. For me, the
writers, the manipulators of ideas, the shapers of them into
human utterance, are the important people of the age, as
well as the most agreeable to meet, in their books or in
life. This particularly pleasant one I have just met is
Frank Stockton. You will laugh at the idea of my discovering
what other people knew long ago, but it happens that I have
only just read his books. The three notes that strike me in
him are his perfect originality, his literary dexterity, and
his new and delicate humor. I cannot say how he delighted
me."
"We are going to give you Andrew Lang to take you in [at the
dinner] on Friday, and on the other side you will have
either James Bryce or Mr. Chapman, the 'enterprising young
publisher' mentioned by Dickens. Regarding Lang, I know no
man who does so many things so very well,--journalist,
philologist, mythological researcher,--and to the front in
all these characters. To almost any one but yourself I
should call him a poet also. His face is very refined and
beautiful."
"I have been reading your poems again. You are as true a
lyric artist as Landor or Herrick. I admire your
sonnets,--they have a particular charm for me, and I am glad
that you do not despise the old English form with the two
last lines in rhyme. Shakespeare's, indeed, are so. I am
almost inclined to think that for our rhymeless language,
for an ear not attuned to the Italian perception for
delicate rhyme of sounds, the strong emphasis on the ending
couplet is right and good."
"I honestly like and admire the genius of Howells. I like
his novels immensely, but his theories not at all."
[Illustration: LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON
_Page 122_]
The brief records in Mrs. Moulton's journal in these days suggest her
crowded life of social enjoyment and literary work. On New Year's day
of 1885 she notes having been the night before at a party at Mrs. Ole
Bull's; and on that day she goes to a reception at the Howard
Ticknors'; friends come to her in the evening. January second falls on
a Friday, and as she is about to visit her daughter and son-in-law in
Charleston, this is her last reception for the season. Naturally, it
is a very full one, and while she does not chronicle the list of her
guests, it is constructively easy to fancy that among them may have
been Dr. Holmes, Professor Horsford, the poet Aldrich and his lovely
wife; Dean Hodges, always one of her most dearly esteemed friends;
Mrs. Ole Bull, the Whipples, Oscar Fay Adams, Professor Lane of
Harvard, Arlo Bates, in whose work, even then, she was taking great
delight; Mrs. Kate Gannett Wells, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, or her
daughter, Mrs. Maud Howe Elliott; Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford; Mrs.
Julius Eichberg and her brilliant daughter, Mrs. Anna Eichberg King
(now Mrs. John Lane of London),--these and many others of her Boston
circle who were habitués of her "Fridays," and seldom, indeed, was one
of these receptions without some guests of special distinction who
were visiting Boston. On one occasion it was Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Gosse
of London; or again, Matthew Arnold; W.D. Howells was to be met there
when in Boston; and not infrequently Colonel T.W. Higginson; Helen
Hunt, whom Mrs. Moulton had long known; Mary Wilkins (now Mrs.
Freeman), always cordially welcomed; Mrs. Clement Waters, the art
writer; President Alice Freeman of Wellesley College (later Mrs.
George Herbert Palmer); and Governor and Mrs. Claflin, at whose home
Whittier was usually a guest during his sojourns in Boston, were among
the familiar guests. Mr. Whittier could seldom be induced to appear
at any large reception; but from Mrs. Moulton's early youth he had
been one of her nearer friends, and his calls were usually for her
alone.
Bliss Carman and Edgar Fawcett from New York were sometimes to be met
in Mrs. Moulton's drawing-room; and there were also a group of Boston
artists,--Arthur Foote who had set to music several of Mrs. Moultons'
lyrics; B.J. Lang and his daughter, who had also set some of Mrs.
Moulton's songs; the painters, I.M. Gaugengigl, Winthrop Pierce, John
Enneking; Miss Porter and Miss Clarke, the editors of _Poet-Lore_;
Caroline Ticknor, the young author whose work continued the literary
traditions of her famous name; and often some of the clergy of
Boston,--the Rev. Dr. Charles Gordon Ames, with Mrs. Ames, both of
whom were among Mrs. Moulton's most dearly-prized friends;
occasionally Rev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale, and Bishop Phillips Brooks;
in a later decade, Rev. Dr. E. Winchester Donald, who succeeded
Phillips Brooks as rector of Trinity; Rev. Bernard Carpenter, a
brother of the Lord Bishop of Ripon; and beside the throngs of
representative people who, at one time or another through some thirty
years, were to be met at Mrs. Moulton's, the socially unknown guest
received from the hostess the same cordial welcome. Her sympathies had
little relation to social standing. No praise of the critics ever gave
her more happiness than did a letter from a stranger in the West,
written by a young girl who had for years been unable to move from her
bed, telling of the blessed ministry of a poem by Mrs. Moulton, of
which the first stanza runs:
We lay us down to sleep,
And leave to God the rest,
Whether to wake and weep
Or wake no more be best.
A book of Mr. Stedman's of which he sent to Mrs. Moulton a copy bore
on its fly-leaf the inscription:
My life-long, loyalist friend,
My sister in life and song.
In the winter of 1885 the journal notes a visit to Mrs. Schaefer in
Charleston, where amid all the festivities she finds time to send
"four short stories and a poem" to various editors. On her way North
she visited Washington, where dinners and receptions were given to her
in private and in diplomatic circles. Then she went on to New York,
and before sailing for Europe met Monsignor Capel at dinner, lunched
with the Lawrence Barretts, attended Mr. Barrett's performance of "The
Blot in the 'Scutcheon," which she found a "wonderful piece of
acting," and at last sailed, as usual lavishly remembered with flowers
and graceful tokens.
In Venice this year Mrs. Moulton wrote the charming pseudo-triolet,
IN VENICE ONCE.
In Venice once they lived and loved--
Fair women with their red gold hair--
Their twinkling feet to music moved,
In Venice where they lived and loved,
And all Philosophy disproved,
While hope was young and life was fair,
In Venice where they lived and loved.
It is interesting to feel in this a far suggestion of Browning's "A
Toccata of Galuppi's," because so seldom does any echo of her
contemporaries strike through Mrs. Moulton's verse.
With friends Mrs. Moulton visited Capri, Sorrento, Amalfi,
Castellamare, Pompeii, and then went on to Rome. Here she passed the
morning of her fiftieth birthday in the galleries of the Vatican.
Friends made a _festa_ of her birthday, with a birthday-cake and
gifts; and she dined with the Storys, to go on later to one of Sir
Moses Ezekiel's notable _musicales_ at his study in the Baths of
Diocletian. "The most picturesque of studios," she wrote, "and a most
cosmopolitan company,--at least fifty ladies and gentlemen,
representing every civilized race.... All languages were spoken.
Pascarella, the Italian poet, recited.... Professor Lunardi, of the
Vatican library, who has his Dante and Ariosto by heart, was talking
Latin to an American Catholic clergyman." Of this studio she gives a
picturesque description:
"Suspended from the lofty ceiling was a hanging basket of
flowers encircled by a score of lights; while around the
walls hundreds of candles in antique sconces were burning,
throwing fitful gleams over marble busts and groups of
statuary. The frescoes on the walls are fragments of the
walls of Diocletian, and the floor is covered with rich
antique tiles fifteen hundred years old. Eight elephants'
heads hold the candles that light the studio on ordinary
occasions. Two colossal forms claim the attention of the
visitor; one, the picture of a herald, drawn by Sir Moses,
holds in his right hand the shield of art; the other is the
figure of Welcome, holding in one hand a glass of wine,
while the other rests upon a shield. The most striking and
interesting work in the studio is the group of Homer. The
figure of the poet is of heroic size, and he is represented
sitting on the seashore, reciting the Iliad, and beating
time with his hands; even in his blindness, his face wears
an expression that seems to be looking into the future and
down through the ages of time. At his feet is seated his
guide, a youth with Egyptian features, who accompanies Homer
with strokes on the lyre."
In the studio was also a bronze bust of Liszt, the only one for which
he ever sat, and which Sir Moses modelled at the Villa d'Este.
After Rome came Florence, where Mrs. Moulton was the guest of Mrs.
Clara Erskine Clement Waters, who had taken a villa in that city.
Among other people whom Mrs. Moulton met at this time was "Ouida," who
unbent from her accustomed stiffness to Americans, and, yielding to
the charm of her guest, displayed her house and pets in a manner which
for her was almost without precedent. Mrs. Waters gave a brilliant
reception in her honor; she was the guest of the Princess Koltzoff
Massalsky (Dora d'Istria), and she visited Professor Fiske at the
Villa Landor, where she was "charmed by his wonderful library" with
its collections of the most notable editions of Dante and Petrarca;
and she was entertained by Professor and Madame Villari.
From Florence she went to Aix-les-Bains. Then she passed to England.
In London she saw constantly almost everybody of note in literary
circles. Her diary records visits to or from or meetings with the Lord
Bishop of Winchester, Mrs. Bloomfield Moore, Lord Morley, Thomas
Hardy, the Bishop of Ripon, Mr. Verschoyle of the _Fortnightly
Review_, William Sharp, Frederick Wedmore, Sir Frederic and Lady
Pollock, Dr. Furnival, and others, for a list too long to give entire.
Her journal shows how full were her days.
"Mrs. Campbell-Praed came to lunch; a lot of callers in the
afternoon, among them the Verschoyles, the Francillons, Mrs.
Cashel-Hoey, Mrs. Fred Chapman, and Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt.
"Went to the Chapmans' to luncheon; met George Meredith....
Meredith is a very brilliant and agreeable man.
"Francillon to luncheon. A lovely letter from Oswald
Crawfurd, praising Andrew Lang.... Went with Mrs. Marable to
see Mrs. Sutherland Orr; a very charming person."
Herbert E. Clarke, whom in a letter to Professor Bates she described
as "a wonderfully charming and fine fellow," accompanied a volume of
his poems which he sent to her with these graceful dedicatory verses:
TO LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON.
(WITH "VERSES ON THE HILLSIDE.")
Go forth, O little flower of song,
To her who found you fair;
After a winter black as night,
I plucked you when spring's smile brought light,
And April's winds were blithe and strong,
And Hope was in the air.
Poor stray of Autumn left to Spring,
I send you forth to be
'Twixt us a pledge of happier hours;
Yea, though she hath far fairer flowers
Always at hand for gathering,
Go forth undoubtingly.
For thou hast gained a happy meed,
And wert thou weed or worse,
With her praise for a light above,
Many should find thee fair, and love
Though not for thine own sake indeed,--
But her sake, O my verse.
Be weed or flower, and live or die,
To me thou art more dear
Than all thy sister flowerets are,
O herald of the single star
That rose above the lowering sky
Of my most hopeless year.
One particularly delightful day was that on which Mrs. Moulton
attended a garden-party at Lambeth Palace as the guest of the
Archbishop of Canterbury and Mrs. Benson. Another of the red-letter
days was an afternoon with the Holman Hunts, in their rambling,
fascinating house, filled with artistic treasures, when on the lawn a
Hungarian orchestra played their national airs. Among the guests were
Lewis Morris, Edwin Arnold, Hall Caine, Theodore Watts-Dunton, and
many others who bore names well known. The diary records, too, a
studio-reception given by Felix Moscheles, a coaching trip to Virginia
Water; and so on for a round of gay doings which make it amazing that
all this time Mrs. Moulton continued her literary work.
In the autumn Mrs. Moulton journeyed to Carlsbad, and there "made Lady
Ashburton's acquaintance in the morning and sat up in the wood with
her for a couple of hours." The acquaintance ripened into a warm
friendship between the two, and Mrs. Moulton was often a guest at Lady
Ashburton's place, Kent House, Knightsbridge. The sonnet "One
Afternoon" is the memory of this first meeting written at Carlsbad a
year after.
On her return to America in the autumn, Mrs. Moulton went to Pomfret
to visit her mother. While there she heard from Miss Guiney of the
death of a young poet, James Berry Bensel, of whom she wrote to Oscar
Fay Adams as follows:
_Mrs. Moulton to Mr. Adams_
28 RUTLAND SQUARE, Sunday.
MY DEAR FRIEND: Your letter just received draws my very
heart out in sympathy. I wish you were here, that I could
tell you all the feelings that it brought, for I know what
it is to lose my dearest friend. Louise Guiney said to me
when she came Friday afternoon: "I have something to tell
you. Bensel is dead. His brother has written me." And I was
not myself all the afternoon. I could not put aside the
thought that pleaded for my tears. And I grieved that I had
not yet written to him about his book. I find such fine
things in it. Come back and let us grieve for him
together,--not that I grieve as you do who loved him so, but
I do understand all you feel, and I felt his death very
unusually, myself. I wish, oh, how I wish, we could call him
back to life, and give him health, and the strength to work,
and more favorable conditions. But we do not know but that
he may now be rejoicing somewhere in a great gain, beyond
our vision. He has gone where our vision cannot find or our
fancy follow him; but he must either be better off in a new
birth or else so deeply at rest that no pain can pierce him
where he is. Good-bye and God bless you.
Yours most truly,
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON.
The Boston winters were full always with social and literary
interests. The relations of Mrs. Moulton to the writers of her circle
were indicated when on her sailing in the spring of one of the late
eighties a post-bag was arranged which was delivered to her in
mid-ocean. The idea originated with Miss Marian Boyd Allen, and among
the contents were a manuscript book of poems for every day by Bliss
Carman; poems by Clinton Scollard, Arlo Bates, Willis Boyd Allen,
Minot J. Savage, Celia Thaxter, the Rev. Bernard Carpenter, Gertrude
Hall, Mary Elizabeth Blake, and Hezekiah Butterworth; a silver
vinaigrette from Professor James Mills Pierce; a book from Mrs. Clara
Erskine Clement Waters; two charming drawings from Winthrop Pierce;
with notes from Nora Perry, Colonel T.W. Higginson, and others. Miss
Guiney addressed as her "Chief Emigrant and Trans-Atlantic Gadder,
Most Ingenious Poet, and Queen of Hearts." Colonel Higginson wrote:
_T.W. Higginson to Mrs. Moulton_
CAMBRIDGE, May 3, 1887.
DEAR FRIEND: I gladly join with others in this mid-ocean
post-bag. I hope you will take your instalments of
friendship in as many successive days. Few American
women,--perhaps none,--have succeeded in establishing such a
pleasant intermedian position before English and American
literature as have you, and as the ocean does not limit your
circle of friends, it seems very proper that we on this side
should stretch our hands to you across it. As one of your
oldest and best friends, I wish you not only "many happy
returns," but one, at least, in the autumn.
Ever cordially,
T.W. HIGGINSON.
On the other side of the Atlantic Philip Bourke Marston and his friend
William Sharp greeted her return to London in three sonnets.
_Philip Bourke Marston to Mrs. Moulton_
UNDESCRIED.--TO L.C.M.
When from her world, new world, she sailed away,
Right out into the sea-winds and the sea,
Did no foreshadowing of good to be
Surprise my heart? That memorable day
Did I as usual rise, think, do, and say
As on a day of no import to me?
Did hope awake no least low melody?
Send forth no spell my wandering steps to stay?
Oh, could our souls catch music of the things
From some lone height of being undescried,
Then had I heard the song the sea-wind sings
The waves; and through the strain of storm and tide,--
As soft as sleep and pure as lovely springs,--
Her voice wherein all sweetnesses abide.
_William Sharp to Mrs. Moulton_
ANTICIPATED FRIENDSHIP
Friend of my friend! as yet to me unknown,
Shall we twain meeting meet and care no more?
Already thou hast left thy native shore,
And to thine ears the laughter and the moan
Of the strange sea by night and day unknown,
Its thunder and its music and its roar;
A few days hence the journey will be o'er,
And I shall know if hopes have likewise flown.
As one hears by the fire a father tell
His eager child some tales of fairy land,
Where no grief is and no funereal bell,
But thronging joys and many a happy band;
So do I hope fulfillment will be well,
And not scant grace, with cold, indifferent hand.
AFTER MEETING
Friend of my friend, the looked-for day has come,
And we have met: to me, at least, a day
Memorable: no hopes have flown away.
Bad fears lie broken, stricken henceforth dumb:
In the thronged room, and in the ceaseless hum
Of many voices, I heard one voice say
A few brief words,--but words that did convey
A subtle breath of friendship, as in some
Few scattered leaves the rose still gives her scent.
Thy hand has been in mine, and I this night
Have seen thine eyes reach answer eloquent
To unseen questions winged for eager flight.
And when, at last, our Philip and I went,
I knew that I had won a fresh delight.
The following letter from Mr. Sharp explains itself in this cluster of
greetings:
_William Sharp to Philip Bourke Marston_
19 ALBERT STREET, REGENT'S PARK.
DEAR PHILIP: I couldn't be bothered going out anywhere, as
you suggested, and an hour or two ago I was able to complete
a second sonnet for the two on "Anticipated Friendship"
addressed to Mrs. Moulton. I told you how much I liked her,
and what a relief it was to find my hopes not disappointed.
In reading these sonnets (at least, the second one) remember
the dolorous condition I am in, and have mercy on all
short-comings that therein abound; and, please, if you think
the spirit of thankfulness in them not sufficient to
overbalance all deficiencies, throw them in the fire without
showing them to their unconscious inspirer, and thus earn
the future gratitude of
Your loving friend,
WILLIAM SHARP.
In February of 1887 Philip Bourke Marston died. He bequeathed to Mrs.
Moulton his books and manuscripts, and many autographs of great
interest and value. Among them was the first page of the original
manuscript of the first great chorus in "Atalanta in Calydon"
corrected in Swinburne's own hand. Marston requested that she should
be his literary executor. Speaking of this work some years later, Mrs.
Moulton said:
"When I first knew the Marstons they were a group of
five,--dear old Dr. Marston, his son, Philip Bourke Marston,
his unmarried daughter Cecily, his married daughter Mrs.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy, and her husband. I edited a volume of
selections by O'Shaughnessy; and I was named by Mr. Marston,
in his will, as his literary executor. I brought out after
his death a volume whose contents had not been hitherto
included in any book, and which I called 'A Last Harvest.'
Then I put all his flower-poems together (as he had long
wished to do) in a volume by themselves, which was entitled
'Garden Secrets.' Finally I have brought out a collected
edition of his poems, including the three volumes published
before his death, and the ones I had compiled after he
died.
"Ah, you may well call his life tragic. He was only three
years old when he lost his sight. He was educated orally,
but his knowledge of literature was a marvel. The poets of
the past were his familiar friends, and he could repeat
Swinburne's poems by the hour. To recite Rossetti's 'House
of Life' was one of the amusements of his solitary days. But
he longed, beyond all things, to be constantly in touch with
the world--to know what every year, every month, was
producing. 'Can you fancy what it is,' he would say to me
sometimes, 'to be just walled in with books that you are
dying to read, and to have them as much beyond your reach as
if they were the other side of the world?' Yet he had,
despite his sad fate, the gayest humor--the most naturally
cheerful temperament; he could be so merry with his
friends--so happy 'when there was anything to be happy
about.' Of his work 'Garden Secrets' is uniquely charming.
Rossetti once wrote him, in a letter of which I am the
fortunate possessor, that he had been reading these 'Garden
Secrets,' the evening before, to William Bell Scott, the
poet-artist, and adds, 'Scott fully agreed with me that they
were worthy of Shakespeare, in his subtlest lyrical moods.'
Some of the best critics in London declared that the author
of 'Song-Tide' (Marston's first volume) should, by virtue
of this one book, take equal rank with Swinburne, Morris,
and Rossetti. Certainly his subsequent volumes fully
sustained the promise of this first one, and I feel that
when Philip Bourke Marston died, at the age of thirty-seven,
on the fourteenth of February, 1887, England lost one of her
noblest and subtlest poets--one whose future promise it were
hard to overrate. Sometimes I think I care most for some of
his sonnets; then the subtle beauty of his lyrics upbraids
me,--and I hardly know which to choose. Take him all in all,
he seems to me a poet whom future generations will recognize
and remember."
Regarding the death of Mr. Marston, Mr. Whittier wrote to the friend
who had brought so much brightness into the life of the blind poet:
_Mr. Whittier to Mrs. Moulton_
CENTRE HARBOR, N.H., 7th month, 1887.
MY DEAR FRIEND, LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON: It was very kind in
thee to send thy admirable little book and most welcome
letter. We have read thy wise and charming essay up here
among the hills, and under the shadow of the pines, with
hearty approval. It was needed, and will do a great deal of
good to young people, in the matter of manners and morals.
It seems a very long time since I had the great pleasure of
seeing thee, or of hearing directly from thee. I meant to
have been in Boston in the early spring, and looked forward
to the satisfaction of meeting thee, but I was too ill to
leave home, and I felt a real pang of regret when I learned
of thy departure. I am now much better, but although I
cannot say with the Scotch poet that
"the years hang o'er my back
And bend me like a muckle pack,"
I must still confess that they are getting uncomfortably
heavy. But I have no complaint to make. My heart is as warm
as ever, and love and friendship as dear.
I was pained by the death of thy friend, Philip Marston. It
must be a comfort to thee to know that thy love and sympathy
made his sad lot easier to be borne. He was one who needed
love, and I think he was one to inspire it also.
My old and comfortable hotel at Centre Harbor, where I have
been a guest for forty years, was burned to ashes a few days
ago, after we came away. But we are now in good, neat
quarters at a neat farm house, with large cool rooms on the
border of the lovely lake.
Good-bye, dear friend! While enjoying thy many friends in
London, do not forget thy friends here.
Ever affectionately thy old friend,
JOHN G. WHITTIER.
Herbert E. Clarke, the warm and intimate friend of Marston, touchingly
alludes to his death in this sonnet.
TO LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON.
Ah, friend, the die is cast,--life turns to prose.
My way lies onward--dusty, hot, and bare,
Through the wide plain under the noonday glare,--
A sordid path whereby no singer goes;
For yon the cloudy crags--the stars and snows--
Limitless freedom of ethereal air
And pinnacles near heaven. On foot I fare,
Halting foredoomed, and toward what goal who knows?
But though the singer who may sing no more
Bears ever in his heart a smothered fire,
I give Fate thanks: nor these my pangs deplore,
Seeing song gave first rewards beyond desire--
Your love, O Friend, and his who went before,
The sightless singer with his silver lyre.
LONDON, 1st August, 1888.
To Arlo Bates, Mrs. Moulton, reading this, repeated the closing line
with a touching tenderness, and then without further word laid the
manuscript aside.
In the middle years of the eighties Mrs. Moulton began to send to the
_Boston Herald_ a series of literary letters from London, and these
she continued for a number of years. She was especially well fitted
for the undertaking by her wide acquaintance with English writers, her
unusual power of appreciating work not yet endorsed by public
approval, and her sympathetic instinct for literary quality. The work,
while arduous, gave her pleasure, chiefly because it provided
opportunity for her to give encouragement and aid to others, and to
help to make better known writers and work not yet appreciated in
America. "I am sending a literary letter each week to the _Boston
Herald_," she writes Mr. Stedman. "It is hard work, but it gives me
the pleasure of expressing myself about the current literature. I
believe the letters are accounted a success."
Many were the letters of gratitude which came to her from those of
whom she had written. The sympathetic quality of her approval, so
rarely found in combination with critical judgment, made her praise
especially grateful. Not only did she interest and enlighten her
reading public, but she encouraged and inspired those of whom she
wrote.
Other letters of grateful recognition came now and then from
artists of whose work she had written in verse. After a visit to the
studio of Burne-Jones in London she was inspired to write the
admirable and subtle lyric "Laus Veneris," upon his picture of that
name.
Pallid with too much longing,
White with passion and prayer,
Goddess of love and beauty,
She sits in the picture there,--
Sits with her dark eyes seeking
Something more subtle still
Than the old delights of loving
Her measureless days to fill.
She has loved and been loved so often,
In the long, immortal years,
That she tires of the worn-out rapture,
Sickens of hopes and fears.
No joys or sorrows move her,
Done with her ancient pride;
For her head she found too heavy
The crown she has cast aside.
Clothed in her scarlet splendor,
Bright with her glory of hair,
Sad that she is not mortal,--
Eternally sad and fair,--
Longing for joys she knows not,
Athirst with a vain desire,
There she sits in the picture,
Daughter of foam and fire.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF THE ORIGINAL DRAFT OF "LAUS VENERIS," IN
MRS. MOULTON'S HANDWRITING
_Page 143_]
It is not to be wondered that the artist wrote in warm acknowledgment:
_Mr. Burne-Jones to Mrs. Moulton_
"I think you must know how glad all workers are of such
sympathy as you have shown me, and I don't know of any other
reward that one ever sets before one's self that can be
compared for a moment with the gratified sense of being
understood. It's like hearing one's tongue in a foreign
land. I do assure you I worked all the more confidently the
day your letter came. Confidence and courage do often fail,
and when all the senses are thoroughly tired with work, and
the heart discouraged, a tribute like the one you sent me is
a real refreshment."
During all these years Mrs. Moulton's mastery of technical form, and
especially her efficiency in the difficult art of the sonnet, had
steadily increased. George H. Boker wrote to her: "In your ability to
make the sonnet all it should be you surpass all your living, tuneful
sisterhood." Certainly after the death of Mrs. Browning no woman
writing English verse could be named as Mrs. Moulton's possible rival
in the sonnet save Christina Rossetti, and no woman in America, if
indeed any man, could rank with her in this.
In many of Mrs. Moulton's sonnets is found a subtle, elusive
suggestion of spiritual things, as if the poet were living between the
two worlds of the seen and the unseen, with half-unconscious
perceptions, strange and swift, of the unknown. With this spiritual
outlook are mingled human love and longing. The existence of any
genuine poet must be dual. He holds two kinds of experience, one that
has been lived in outward life; the other, not less real, that has
been lived intuitively and through the power of entering, by sympathy,
into other lives and varied qualities of experience.
Mrs. Moulton's imaginative work, both in her stories and her poems,
suggests this truth in a remarkable degree. Her nature presents a
sensitive surface to impressions. She has the artist's power of
selection from these, and the executive gift to combine, arrange, and
present. Thus her spiritual receptivity gives to her work that deep
vitality, that sense of soul in it that holds the reader, while her
artistic touch moulds her rare and exquisite beauty of finished
design.
In 1889 Mrs. Moulton published another volume of collected tales, the
last that she made. It was entitled "Miss Eyre from Boston, and Other
Stories." Her natural power and grace in fiction made these charming,
but it is by her poetry rather than by her prose that she will be
remembered. To her verse she gave her whole heart. To her short
stories only, so to say, her passing fancy.
On her way north from a visit to her daughter in Charleston, Mrs.
Moulton saw Walt Whitman. Little as she could be in sympathy with his
chaotic art-notions, she was much impressed by his personality. Her
diary records:
"Went with Talcott Williams to see Walt Whitman, a grand,
splendid old man. He sat in the most disorderly room I ever
saw, but he made it a temple for his greatness. He expounded
his theories of verse; he spoke of his work, of his boyhood;
of his infirmities merely by way of excuse for his
difficulty in moving, and he gave me a book. He was
altogether delightful."
From the diary one gets a curiously vivid impression that Mrs.
Moulton's work was done in the very midst of interruptions and almost
in an atmosphere so markedly social that it might seem to be utterly
incompatible with imaginative production. Of course, a large number of
those whom she saw most intimately were concerned chiefly with the
artistic side of life, and this in a measure explains the anomaly; but
the fact remains that she had an extraordinary power of doing really
fine work in scraps and intervals of time which would to most writers
have seemed completely inadequate.
"Full of interruptions, but managed to get written an
editorial entitled 'A Post Too Late.'"
"Went to Lady Seton's breakfast-party and sat beside Oswald
Crawfurd. In the morning before I went out at all I wrote a
sonnet commencing,
"Have pity on my loneliness, my own!"
"Finished _Herald_ letter. Mr. F.W.H. Myers called. Lunched
at Walter Pater's and met M. Gabriel Sarrazin, the French
critic, who told me that Guy de Maupassant thought the three
disgraces for a French author were to be _décoré_, to belong
to the Academy, and to write for the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_."
"Jan. 1, 1889. Wrote poem, 'At Dawn,' or whatever better
title I can think of. Spent the time from 8 to 2 in
correcting my 13,000 words story."
"Louise Guiney came in to help me look over my poems. We
worked till night, then went to the Cecilia concert to hear
Maida Lang's quartet."
"Such a busy morning! Polished off a rondel to send to the
_Independent_. Read _Herald_ proof; wrote letters. This
afternoon pleasant guests,--Mrs. Ole Bull, Mr. Clifford,
Percival Lowell, and others."
[In New York.] "Went over to Brooklyn and gave a Browning
reading.... Met the Russian Princess Engalitcheff. Lunched
at Mrs. Field's with the Princess and Mr. and Mrs. Locke
Richardson. Went in the evening to the Gilders'."
"Wrote a little.... Mrs. [John T.] Sargent and sweet Nellie
Hutchinson called in the forenoon; and in the afternoon ten
people, including Stedman."
[In London.] "Worked on poems in forenoon. Had a lovely
basket of flowers from dear old Mr. Greenough. Gave a little
dinner at night at the Grand Hotel, to the Oswald Crawfurds,
Sir Bruce Seton, Mrs. Trubner, and Mr. Greenough."
Extracts of this sort might be multiplied, and they explain why it was
that amid so much apparent preoccupation with social affairs Mrs.
Moulton kept steadily her place as a literary worker. Her genuine and
abiding love for letters was the secret of her ability thus to enter
with zest into the pleasures of life without losing her power of
artistic production.
Among the records of the year 1889 is this touching entry, with the
date April 27, at the close of a visit to her mother:
"Poor mother's last words to me were: 'I love you better
than anything in this world. You are my first and last
thought. Believe it, for it is the _truth_.'"
In London this summer Mrs. Moulton was considering a title for a new
volume of poems, and had asked advice of William Winter. He chanced to
be in England at the time, and wrote at once:
_Mr. Winter to Mrs. Moulton_
No. 13 UPPER PHILLIMORE PLACE,
HIGH STREET, KENSINGTON,
August 14, 1889.
DEAR LOUISE: Your letter has just come. Business affairs
brought me suddenly to town. I will seek to see you as soon
as they can be disposed of, Saturday or Sunday, perhaps.
But I deeply regret your not coming to the "Red Horse." He
might have led us a glorious fairy race. The only one of
your titles that hits my fancy is "Vagrant Moods," and that
is not good enough. Fancy titles are dangerous things. They
generally have been used before. I once made use of the word
"Thistledown," as a title for a collection of my poems, and
too late found it had been used by an American lady, Miss
Boyle, for a similar purpose. And Miss Boyle, or her
attorneys, threatened me with the terrors of the law for
infringement of copyright. I was also told that Miss Boyle's
book had recently passed through my hands; and this was
true, though I had not the least recollection of the book or
its title. In fact, I had never read a line of it, but only
at the request of a friend of hers turned it over to Bayard
Taylor for review. He wrote a notice of it in _The Tribune_.
And here, only lately, I learn from an Australian paper that
my title of "Shakespeare's England," used by me to indicate
the England of poetry, was used twenty-five years ago by a
writer about the active England of Shakespeare's time.
"Poems, by L.C.M." would be safer than any fancy title.
"Awfully hackneyed," I hear. Well, if you have a fancy
title, why not cull out a Shakespearian phrase? "The
Primrose Path," say? Think a little about this. I will think
further. Only look up clear, and so God bless you and good
night.--What a lonely place this with no one to speak to and
no one to hear.
Always,
Your old friend,
WILLIAM WINTER.
The solution of Mrs. Moulton's difficulty was found in the attractive
title, "In the Garden of Dreams." The volume appeared in the following
year.
Among the special friendships of Mrs. Moulton's life of both literary
and personal interest, one of the most important and enjoyable to her
was that with Professor Arlo Bates, the poet and romancist, whose work
she appreciated highly and whose sympathetic companionship gave her
great pleasure. With him she felt a peculiar sympathy, and to him she
wrote a series of letters, extending over many years, beginning in the
decade of the eighties. The extracts presented from these are here
grouped, as, while they thus lose a strict chronological thread, they
gain in a more complete representation, and their nature is such that
the precise date (rarely given, indeed, as they were mostly dated by
a month only) is, in any case, negligible in importance.
The extracts chosen deal almost exclusively with literary matters. The
only son of Professor Bates, in his twentieth year, afterward the
author of "A Madcap Cruise," whom Mrs. Moulton playfully called
"Prince Oric," and to whom in his sixth year she wrote a delicious
sonnet under that title, is alluded to, as well as is his mother, who
wrote over the pen-name Eleanor Putnam.
_Mrs. Moulton to Arlo Bates_
"... Thanks for the charming book. My love to the sweetest
wife I know. Thank her for her letter...."
"... Your letter about Marston's songs came to me when he
and William Sharp happened to be passing the evening with
me. I read it aloud, to Mr. Marston's great delight. It
quite went to his heart.... I am so sorry I shall not find
you and Mrs. Bates where you were last year. That desperate
flirtation with Master Oric is off entirely...."
"... I have just been reading 'Childe Roland,' and it
baffles me, as it has so often done before. I feel less sure
that I understand it than any other of Browning's poems. Is
the Black Tower Death, do you think? But what a wonderful
poem it is! I suppose spiritual judgments concern themselves
with spiritual states...."
"... I am delighted with what you say of Mr. Marston's poem
in _Harper's_, because I think the poem too subtle and
delicate to be appreciated, save by the very elect; and I am
also delighted because what you said gave him so much
pleasure. Marston said of you, 'What a wonderful
psychological vein, almost as powerful as that of Browning,
runs through many of the poems of Mr. Bates.'..."
"... I am so eager to see your novel of artistic Boston.
'The Pagans,'--a capital title. I am glad you have had the
courage to tell the truth in it as you see it. I don't see
it quite as you do, I fancy, but I am thankful when any one
has the courage of his opinions, for it seems to me that the
English and American writers are just now very much like
cats standing on the edge of a stream, and afraid to put in
their feet. They say what they think is expected of them to
say, and they reserve the truth for the seasons when they
enter their closets and shut the door on all the world. I
think there is more hypocrisy in novels than in religion."
"... I am ashamed that two weeks have gone by since I
received your noble book, 'Told in the Gate.' I have not
been so neglectful of it as it seems. I have not only taken
my own pleasure in it, but I have shown it to other poets
who are interested in knowing what is being done in America.
It is a beautiful book externally--how beautiful it is
internally I am sure the world of readers will eagerly
perceive; but never one of them can love it more than I do.
Even in print it is hard for me to say which poem I prefer.
There is not one among them that is not well done from the
point of art, and thrillingly interesting as a story. The
lyrics star the book like gems. They sing themselves over
and over to my listening mind.... I feel a glow of exultant
pride that the author is my friend. I am proud and glad to
have my name inscribed in a volume I so admire and love. I
am enjoying London as I always do.... I go toward the end of
August to pay some visits in Scotland, and then to visit
Lady Ashburton in Hampshire and after that to Paris. I
enclose some foreign stamps for the young Prince.... Your
poems are among the pleasures of my life."
Of the sonnets of Mr. Bates Mrs. Moulton wrote:
"... Dante breathed through the sonnet the high aspirations
of that love which shaped and determined his soul's life. By
sonnets it was that Petrarch wedded immortally his name to
that of his ever-wooed, never-won Laura of Avignon. Strong
Michael Angelo wrote sonnets for that noble lady, Vittoria
Colonna, whose hand he kissed only after Death had kissed
the soul from her pure lips.
"The one personal intimacy with Shakespeare to which any of
his worshippers have been admitted is such as comes from
loving study of his sonnets, in 'sessions of sweet, silent
thought.' The sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning burned
with the pure flame of her perfect love. In the sonnets of
'The House of Life' Rossetti commemorated that love and loss
so passionate and so abiding that it seemed to him the whole
of life. In the sonnets of 'Song-Tide' Marston sang the
praises of his early love, as in those of 'All In All' he
bewailed her loss; and his sonnets of later years throb like
a tell-tale heart with the profoundest melancholy out of
whose depths a human soul ever cried for pity.
"Such and thus intimate have been the revelations made
through this form of verse--so rigid, yet so plastic and so
human.
"To the list of these sonneteers who have thus sounded the
deepest depths of love and sorrow, the name of Arlo Bates
has now been added, by the publication of his noble and
sincere 'Sonnets in Shadow.' Born of one man's undying pain,
these sonnets at once become, through the subtlety of their
research into the innermost depths of human emotion, the
property and the true expression of all souls who have loved
and suffered.
"A few of us know, personally, the rare charm, the exquisite
loveliness, of her thus royally honored and passionately
lamented; and all of us who read can feel that thus and thus
our own hearts might be wrung by such a loss--that in us,
also, if we have souls at all, such sorrow might bear fruit
in kindred emotion, even though for want of words our lips
be dumb. It seems to me that it is the dumb souls--who feel
all that the poet has sung, and yet cannot break the silence
with a cry--who owe the deepest debt to this, their
interpreter."
_Mrs. Moulton to Mr. Bates_
"OCTOBER 27, 1889.
"I have been passing this rainy afternoon with your sonnets.
I had read some of them more than once before, but this
afternoon I have been quite alone save for their good
company. I have read the strong, noble sequence through,
from first to last, enjoying them more than ever. I like
every one of them, but I had a pencil and paper by me and
put down the numbers that most moved me. I see that my list
is not short; do you care to see what it includes? It begins
with the beautiful sonnet of dedication; then the first,
with its wonderful procession of the gray days passing the
torpid soul, and laying their 'curious fingers, chill and
numb,' upon its wounds. Then the sixth, with the
"... drowned sailors, lying lank and chill
Under the sirupy green wave.
And the fifteenth with its visions of love.
"Never can joy surmise how long are sorrow's hours,
ought to be, like certain lines of Wordsworth, among the
immortal quotations. I think your sonnets noble alike in
thought and in execution. They can have no more faithful
lover than I am; and I do believe that if there is anything
in which my opinion has any value, it is on the form of
poetry. I love it so sincerely and I have studied it so
devotedly....
"... Mrs. Spofford has been to stay over Sunday with me and
I read through to her your new volume of poems, with the
exception of 'The Lilies of Mummel See,' which she read to
me. I think you would be pleased; could you know how much we
both enjoyed and admired the book. To my mind, 'Under the
Beech Tree' is the finest romantic drama of the time. I like
it far better than I do 'Colombe's Birthday,' much as I like
that. Mrs. Spofford is quite wild with enthusiasm about 'The
Gift.' She said the last line,
"His heart is still mine, beating warm in my grave,
is not only the finest line in your book, but the finest
line that has been written by any one in a score of years."
"... Your suggestion as to national characteristics of women
struck me as a curious coincidence with the fact that the
editor of the _Fortnightly_ has just asked me to write an
article on American and English women, contrasting and
comparing them, and discussing their differences. But the
differences; seem to me individual, not national.
"Thanks for your suggestion about the sonnet.
"Break through the shining, splendid ranks
seems to me simpler and more forcible, but then this
involves the 'I pray,' to which you greatly object.
"Break through their splendid militant array:
"I'll copy both, and see what you think. On the whole, I
like yours better.
"I have been arranging books all the afternoon, and I am so
tired that I wish I had the young prince here, or such
another,--only there is no other."
_The same to the same_
"DEAR PAGAN: I am on page 238 of 'The Puritans,' and I pause
to say how piteously cruel is your portrait of ----.
Sargent, at his best, was never so relentlessly realistic. I
pity Fenton so desperately I can hardly bear it. Why do I
sympathize so with him when he is so little worthy? Is it
your fault, or mine? I believe I am not pitiless enough to
write novels, even if I had every other qualification.
"Your character of Fenton is admirably studied. It is worthy
of the author of 'The Pagans' and 'A Wheel of Fire.'"
"... I have finished reading 'The Puritans,'--all the duties
of life neglected till I came to the end. I have not been so
interested in a book for ages. I am especially interested in
the conflict of the souls between degrees of agnosticism. It
is the keenest longing of my life to know what is truth."
"I have reason to be grateful for your birthday, since I
find you one of the most interesting persons I have ever had
the happiness to know."
"I have just finished reading 'The Diary of a Saint,' and I
cannot wait an hour to tell you how very greatly I admire
it. It has been said that all the stories were told. You
prove how untrue is this statement,--for your story, or
anything like it, has never been told before. It is
absolutely unique and original.... I am so interested in
every page of the book that I have an impatient desire to
know all the spiritual experiences that lead to it."
"Just now at Les Voirons (Haute Savoie) I have found a sort
of hilltop paradise. Four thousand and more feet above the
sea level, the air is like balm, and the views indescribably
lovely. I have never seen Mont Blanc half so well. It is far
more wonderful than the view from Chamounix. And just now at
night the white ghost of a young moon hangs above it, in a
pale, clear sky, and the lesser peaks all around shimmer in
the moonlight. This hotel is ten climbing miles from any
railroad station. You can buy nothing here but postage
stamps."
In a characteristic letter from Rome, Richard Greenough, the sculptor,
says:
_Mr. Greenough to Mrs. Moulton_
"The sidereal certainty of your movements impresses me. It
reminds me of the man who ordered his dinner in England a
year in advance, and when the time came he was there to eat
it.... Do I feel sure of a life after this? Was ever a note
charged with such heavy ballast? To attempt an answer would
take a volume,--to give an answer would require a
conscience.... While reading Cicero's Tusculan Disputations
'On Grief,' I found a quotation from Sophocles that reminds
me of your loss in Philip's death.
"No comforter is so endowed with wisdom
That while he soothes another's heavy grief,
If altered fortune turns on him her blow,
He will not bend beneath the sudden shock
And spurn the consolation he had given.
"I wonder if you know how poetic you are? Do what you
may,--read, write, or talk, you make real life seem ideal,
and ideal life seem real. Your sweet 'After Death' is above
all praise."
On the appearance of "Robert Elsmere" Mrs. Moulton read it with the
greater interest in that, as has already been noted, her own mind
constantly reverted to religious problems. Writing to Mrs. Humphry
Ward to congratulate her on the achievement, she received the
following reply:
_Mrs. Ward to Mrs. Moulton_
LONDON, June 20, 1888.
DEAR MRS. MOULTON: Thanks for your interesting letter _in
re_ Robert Elsmere. There is no answer merely to the
problems of evil and suffering except that of an almost
blind trust. I see dimly that evil is a condition of good.
Heredity and environment are awful problems. They are also
the lessons of God.
Sincerely yours,
MARY A. WARD.
The publication in 1889 of the collection of poems entitled "In the
Garden of Dreams" added greatly to Mrs. Moulton's standing as a poet.
On the title-page were the lines of Tennyson:
Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love.
The book contained a group of lyrics "To French Tunes," which showed
that Mrs. Moulton had responded to the fashion for the old French
forms of rondel, rondeau, triolet, and so on which in the eighties
prevailed among London singers. They showed her facility in
manipulating words in metre and were all graceful and delicate; but
she was a poet of emotion too genuine and feeling too strong to be at
her best in these artificial and constrained measures. She wrote a few
in later years, which were included in the volume called "At the
Wind's Will," but although they were praised she never cared for them
greatly or regarded them as counting for much in her serious work. The
book as a whole showed how the natural lyric singer had developed into
the fine and subtle artist. The noblest portion of the collection, as
in her whole poetic work, was perhaps in the sonnets; but throughout
the volume the music of the lines was fuller and freer, the thought
deeper, the emotion more compelling than in her earlier work. With
this volume Mrs. Moulton took her place at the head of living American
poets, or, as an English critic phrased it, "among the true poets of
the day."
The voice of the press was one of unanimous praise on both sides of
the Atlantic. The privately expressed criticisms of the members of the
guild of letters were no less in accord. Mrs. Spofford said of
"Waiting Night":
"It is a perfect thing. The wings of flying are all through
it. It is fine, and free, and beautiful as the 'Statue and
the Bust.' It is high, and sweet, and touching."
_Dr. Holmes to Mrs. Moulton_
296 BEACON ST.,
December 29, 1889.
MY DEAR MRS. MOULTON: I thank you most cordially for sending
me your beautiful volume of poems. They tell me that they
are breathed from a woman's heart as plainly as the
fragrance of a rose reveals its birthplace. I have read
nearly all of them--a statement I would not venture to make
of most of the volumes I receive, the number of which is
legion, and I cannot help feeling flattered that the author
of such impassioned poems should have thought well enough of
my own productions to honor me with the kind words I find on
the blank leaf of a little book that seems to me to hold
leaves torn out of the heart's record.
Believe me, dear Mrs. Moulton,
Faithfully yours,
O.W. HOLMES.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF A LETTER FROM OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
_Page 164_]
_Dr. Rolfe to Mrs. Moulton_
CAMBRIDGE, Christmas, 1889.
DEAR MRS. MOULTON: How can I thank you enough for giving me
a free pass to your "Garden of Dreams" with its delightful
wealth of violets, fresh and sweet; lilies and roses,
rosemary, and Elysian asphodel, and every flower that sad
embroidery weaves? Put your ear down close and let me
whisper very confidentially,--tell it not at our meetings at
the Brunswick, publish it not in the streets of Boston! that
I like your delicate and fragrant blossoms better than some
of the hard nuts that the dear, dead Browning has given us
in his "Asolando." Sour critics may tell us that the latter
will last longer,--they are tough enough to endure,--but I
doubt not that old Father Time,--who is not destitute of
taste, withal,--will press some of your charming flowers
between his ponderous chronicles, where their lingering
beauty and sweetness will delight the appreciation of
generations far distant. So may it be!
Luckily, one may wander at will with impunity in your lovely
garden, even if he has as bad a cold as at present afflicts
and stupefies your friend, tho
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