Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend

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 dipTheir 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 beautyThe lilies and silk between...."The birds make insolent musicWhere 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. Moulton19 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.

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 sunIn 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. MoultonCambridge, 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.

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.MTake thou, as symbol of thyself, this roseWhich blooms in our world's winter.Dank and proneLie 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 zoneOf 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 surpriseTo faith in Youth's dear, dissipated skies;Soul-flower, still shed thine influence!Sun nor windControl not thee; thy life thy charm suppliesAnd makes the beauty which it does not find.W.M.Christmas Eve.

CHAPTER V

1880-1890

The busy shuttle comes and goesAcross the rhymes, and deftly weavesA tissue out of autumn leaves,With here a thistle, there a rose.With art and patience thus is madeThe poet's perfect Cloth of Gold;When woven so, nor earth nor mouldNor 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 IncantationsOf 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.

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. MoultonCraigie 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: