Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/29

18 Alice Brown, Louise Guiney, and, in fact, of almost every one of any interest or achievement here, her English acquaintance was and is equally extensive, as she has been on pleasant terms with Sir Walter Besant, Wiliiam Sharp, Dr. Honler, Mathilde Blind, Holman Hunt, Mrs. Clifford, Mrs. Campbell-Praed, Coulson Kernahan, John Davidson, Kenneth Grahame, Richard Le Gallienne, Anthony Hope, Robert Hichens, William Watson, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Alice Meynell, not to speak of Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Jean Ingelow, William Black, and many another of both the living and the dead.

It is in Boston that she has done the greater part of her work, collated and collected a few of her many stories and of her essay's into volumes, written her books of travel, "Random Rambles" and "Lazy Tours," books full of interest, published her four volumes of poetry, and edited and prefaced with biographies "A Last Harvest" and "Garden Secrets," and the "Collected Poems" of Philip Bourke Marston, and also a selection from Arthur O'Shaughnessy's verses, generous with her time, her effort, her money, and her praise.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote Mrs. Moulton that he was touched with the passionate sincerity of her poems. "I cannot see," he added, "that the life of ardent youth is dying out of you, or like to." Sincerity, indeed, is the keynote both of her nature and her work. She is not methodical in her processes, never finding herself able to work through mere intellectual endeavor, unless some strong emotion stirs her to the deeps. Thomas Hardy speaks of the poems in "The Garden of Dreams" as being penetrated "by the supreme quality, emotion." "It is not art but nature that gave her," said William Minto, "the spontaneity and directness which are so marked characteristics of most of her poems, or that epigrammatic concision which enables her often to express in a sentence a whole problem or experience."

One of Mrs. Moulton's most appreciative, scholastic, and discriminating critics was Professor Meiklejohn, who for twenty-seven years occupied a chair in the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and who was the author of a translation of Kant, of "The Art of Writing English," and other books of importance. He has said with authority that she deserved to be classed with the best Elizabethan lyrists in her lyrics, — with Herrick and Campion and Shakespeare,—while in her sonnets she might rightly take a place with Milton and Wordsworth and 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."

Of poems in the next volume, "The Garden of Dreams," Professor 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 sixteenth century, noble and daring rhythms, the "quintessence of passion," successes gained by the "courage of simplicity," rare specimens of