Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend. Lilian Whiting
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