Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/28

Rh

The reader must agree with the critic that this 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 Burne-Jones said it made him work all the more confidently and was a real refreshment.

Could anything be in stronger or more glorious contrast to the "House of Death" or to "Arcady" or to that great sonnet, "At War," or show more varied power?

Few people could have met such praise and appreciation as Mrs. Moulton received, so calmly, so sedately and gently, without one flutter of gratified vanity. Indeed, she is to-day the most modest and most humble-minded of women.

With the exception of the two years immediately following Mr. Moulton's death, when she remained at home and in seclusion, Mrs. Moulton has every summer sailed away for the foreign shores where she is so welcomed and so loved. Although possibly few Americans have had such a social as well as literary success abroad, the hospitality she has received has never been violated by her in pen or word: she has printed no letters and uttered no gossip concerning the houses in which she has been a guest. She has been, through all and everything, a woman of unerring sense of right and courtesy, of whom all other Americans may be proud. Every winter sees her back in Boston, where her house is a centre of literary life, and where one is sure to find every stranger of distinction. For her acquaintance among English people of prominence is as extensive as among those of our own country. The friend of Longfellow and Whittier and Holmes in their lifetime, the acquaintance of Boker, and Emerson, and Lowell, and Boyle O'Reilly, and of Sarah Helen Whitman (the fiancee of Edgar Allan Poe), of Rose Terry and Nora Perry, as she is still of Stedman and Stoddard, Mrs. Howe, Arlo Bates, Edward Everett Hale, Howells, William Winter, Anne Whitney,