 
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
In few lives have these possibilities been more fully realized than in that of Louise Chandler Moulton, poet and friend, and
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 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 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
Elmwood Cottage Elmwood Cottage, Pomfret, Conn., the Girlhood Home of Louise Chandler Moulton Page 5 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 refine
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
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
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 In some ways Ellen Louise had a rather lonely childhood save that an imaginative and "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:
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 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; 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 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 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
Another lyric, written about this time to Governor Cleveland on the death of his only daughter, contained these lines:
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 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 |
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