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.