Louise Chandler Moulton

Juno Clifford

Six weeks after leaving the Troy Female Seminary,[1] on August 27, 1855,[2] she married a Boston publisher, William Upham Moulton (d. 1898), under whose auspices her earliest literary work had appeared in The True Flag. In 1855, she published, Juno Clifford, a story issued anonymously ("By A Lady"; 1855),[1][4] and by My Third Book followed in 1859.[5]

Frontispiece of Poets and Sonnets of Louise Chandler Moulton (1909)

Her literary output was interrupted until 1873 when she resumed activity with Bed-time Stories,[6] the first of a series of volumes, including Firelight Stories (1883) and Stories told at Twilight (1890).[7]

Meanwhile, she had taken an important place in American literary society, writing regular critiques for the New York Tribune from 1870 to 1876.[8] Serving as the paper's Boston literary correspondent,[2] she wrote a series of interesting letters concerning the literary life of Boston, giving advance reviews of new books and telling of the affairs of the Radical Club. In all the six years during which these letters appeared, she never made in them any unkind statement, or wrote a sentence that could cause pain. Through all her critical work, she has exercised a tender regard for the feelings of others, as well as great generosity of praise, preferring rather to be silent than to utter an unkindness.[1]

Her first voyage to Europe was made in January 1876. Pausing in London long enough to see Queen Victoria open Parliament in person for the first time after the Prince Consort's death, she hastened through Paris on her way to Rome to view old palaces, gardens, and galleries, touched to tears by Pope Pius IX's benediction, enjoying the hospitality of the studios of Elihu Vedder, John Rollin Tilton, and others, and of the gracious and charming social life of Rome. Her descriptions of all this, overflowing with the sensitiveness to beauty which was a part of her nature, made her Random Rambles interesting reading.[9] After Rome, she visited Florence, and then Venice, and then again Paris, and again London and the London season. Entertained by Lord Houghton, she met Robert Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Eliot, Alexander William Kinglake, Theodore Watts-Dunton, and others, seeing especially a great deal of Browning who said, "Her voice, wherein all sweetnesses abide," having as much to do with all this as her literary excellence.[1]

In the winter of 1876, the Macmillans brought out her first volume of Poems (renamed Swallow flights in the English edition of 1877),[10][11] which was highly praised by the critics. The Examiner spoke of the power and originality of the verses, of the music and the intensity as surpassing any verse of George Eliot's, declaring that the sonnet entitled "One Dread" might have been written by Sir Philip Sidney. The Athenaeum also dwelt on the vivid and subtle imagination and delicate loveliness of these verses and their perfection of technique. The Academy spoke warmly of their felicity of epithet, their healthiness, their suggestiveness, their imaginative force pervaded by the depth and sweetness of perfect womanhood. The Tattler pronounced her a mistress of form and of artistic perfection, saying also that England had no poet in such full sympathy with woods and winds and waves, finding in her the one truly natural singer in an age of aesthetic imitation. "She gives the effect of the sudden note of the thrush," it said. "She is as spontaneous as Walther von der Vogelweide. The Times, The Morning Post, the Literary World, all welcomed the book with equally warm praise, and The Pall Mall Gazette spoke of her lyrical feeling as like that which gave a unique charm to Heinrich Heine's songs. She had met very few of these critics, and their cordial recognition was as surprising to her as it was delightful. Among the innumerable letters which she received, filled with admiring warmth, were some from Matthew Arnold, Henry Austin Dobson, Frederick Locker, and William Bell Scott.[1]

In Childhood's Country by Louise Chandler Moulton

Her songs were set to music by Francesco Berger and Lady Charlesmont, and later on by Margaret Ruthven Lang, Arthur Foote, Ethelbert Nevin, and many others. Marston wrote her, "Much as we all love and admire your work, it seems to me we have not yet fully realized the unostentatious loveliness of your lyrics, as fine for lyrics as your best sonnets are for sonnets. 'How Long' struck me more than ever. The first verse is eminently characteristic of you, exhibiting in a very marked degree what runs through nearly all of your poems, the most exquisite and subtle blending of strong emotion with the sense of external nature. It seems to me this perfect poem is possessed by the melancholy yet tender music of winds sighing at twilight, in some churchyard, through old trees that watch beside silent graves. Then nothing can be more subtly beautiful than the closing lines of the sonnet, 'In Time to Come':— "'Which was it spoke to you, the wind or I? I think you, musing, scarcely will have heard.'" Marston wrote her again concerning "The House of Death" that it was one of the most beautiful, the most powerful poems he knew. "No poem gives me such an idea of the heartlessness of Nature. The poem is Death within and Summer without—light girdling darkness—and it leaves a picture and impression on the mind never to be effaced." The poem of "The House of Death" is unequalled in its tragic beauty and sweetness. It was apropos of this volume that in one of his letters to her Robert Browning said he had closed the book with music in his ears and flowers before his eyes, and not without thoughts across his brain. And it was concerning a later poem, "Laus Veneris," inspired by a painting of his own, that Edward Burne-Jones said it made him work all the more confidently and was a real refreshment.[1]

One of Moulton's most appreciative, scholastic, and discriminating critics was Professor John Meiklejohn. He has said with authority that she deserved to be classed with the best Elizabethan lyricists in her lyrics,—with Robert Herrick and Thomas Campion and Shakespeare,—while in her sonnets she might rightly take a place with John Milton and William Wordsworth and Christina Rossetti. "I cannot tell you how keen and great enjoyment (sometimes even rapture)," he wrote her, "I have got out of your exquisite lyrics." In a series of "Notes," following the poems, line by line, he asserted that the poet won her success by the simplest means and plainest words, as true genius always does, and that her pages were full of emotional and imaginative meaning, Nature and Poetry uniting in an indissoluble whole; and Shelley himself, he said, would have been proud to own certain of the lines. The poem "Quest" he found so beautiful that, in his own words, it was "difficult to speak of it in perfectly measured and unexaggerated language." Of the poem "Wife to Husband" he said that "the tenderness, the sweet and compelling rhythm, are worthy of the best Elizabethan days." The sonnet, "A Summer's Growth," "unites," he says, the "passion of such Italian poets as Dante with the imagination of modern English." This was in relation to her first volume, "Swallow Flights"; and in conclusion he said: "This poet must look for her brothers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among the noble and intense lyrists. Her insight, her subtlety, her delicacy, her music, are hardly matched, and certainly not surpassed by Herrick or Campion or Crashaw or Carew or Herbert or Vaughan."[1]

In the garden of dreams

She wrote a weekly literary letter for the Sunday issue of the Boston Herald from 1886 to 1892. Thenceforward, she spent the summers in London and the rest of the year in Boston, where her salon was one of the principal resorts of literary talent. In 1889, another volume of verse, In the Garden of Dreams, confirmed her reputation as a poet.[12] Of the poems in this volume, "In the Garden of Dreams," Meiklejohn affirmed that the perfect little gem, "Roses," was worthy of Goethe, and that "As I Sail" had the firmness and imaginativeness of Heine, the perfect simplicity containing magic. "Wordsworth never wrote a stronger line," he said of one in "Voices on the Wind." In "At the Wind's Will" again the same critic recognized the strong style of the 16th century, noble and daring rhythms, the "quintessence of passion," successes gained by the "courage of simplicity," rare specimens of compression as well as of sweetness. "The Gentle Ghost of Joy" he thought "a wonderful voluntary in the best style of Chopin." In a line of one of the sonnets, "Yet done with striving and foreclosed of care," he finds something as good as anything of Drayton's. He pronounced the two sonnets called "Great Love" worthy of a "place among Dante's and Petrarch's sonnets," and of the sonnet, "Were but my Spirit loosed upon the Air," he wrote, "It is one of the greatest and finest sonnets in the English language."[1]

Lazy Tours in Spain and Elsewhere

She also wrote several volumes of prose fiction, including Miss Eyre from Boston and Other Stories,[13] and some descriptions of travel, including Lazy Tours in Spain (1896). She was well known for the extent of her literary influence, the result of a sympathetic personality combined with fine critical taste.[14]

• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Browne, Francis Fisher; Thayer, Scofield; Browne, Waldo Ralph (1910). The Dial. Vol. 49 (Public domain ed.). Jansen, McClurg & Company.
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Howe, Julia Ward; Graves, Mary Hannah (1904). Representative Women of New England (Public domain ed.). New England Historical Publishing Company. p. 12.
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Moulton, Louise Chandler (1881). Random Rambles (Public domain ed.). Roberts brothers.
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Moulton, Louise Chandler (1878). Swallow-flights (Public domain ed.). Macmillan and Company.
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Moulton, Louise Chandler (1890). Stories Told at Twilight (Public domain ed.). Roberts Brothers.[1]
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Moulton, Louise Chandler (1889). Miss Eyre from Boston: And Others (Public domain ed.). Roberts Brothers.
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Moulton, Louise Chandler (1873). Bed-time Stories (Public domain ed.). Roberts brothers.
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Moulton, Louise Chandler; A Lady (1856). Juno Clifford: A Tale (Public domain ed.). D. Appleton.
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Cooke, Rose Terry (1884). Our Famous Women: An Authorized Record of the Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Times ... (Public domain ed.). A. D. Worthington & Company.
• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Moulton, Louise Chandler" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

• Frank, Lisa Tendrich (2008). Women in the American Civil War. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-85109-600-8.