Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend. Lilian Whiting

      Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend

      CHAPTER I

      1835-1853

      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

      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

      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:

      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.

      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:

      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:

      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: