Louise Chandler Moulton

American poet (1835–1908)

Louise Chandler Moulton (April 10, 1835 August 10, 1908) was an American poet, story writer and critic. Contributing poems and stories of power and grace to the leading magazines, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, The Galaxy, the first Scribner's, she also published a half dozen very successful books for children, Bedtime Stories, Firelight Stories, Stories Told at Twilight, and others that were considered popular in their day. She collected a few of her many adult tales into volumes, Miss Eyre of Boston and Some Women's Hearts. It is in Boston that she did the greater part of her work, including her books of travel, Random Rambles and Lazy Tours, published her four volumes of poetry, and edited and prefaced biographies, A Last Harvest and Garden Secrets, and the Collected Poems of Philip Bourke Marston, as well as a selection from Arthur O'Shaughnessy's verses.

Ellen Louise Chandler was born April 10, 1835, in Pomfret, Connecticut, the only child of Lucius L. Chandler and Louisa R. (Clark) Chandler. Moulton's imagination was fostered during her childhood. Her parents clung to the strictest Calvinistic principles. Games, dances, romances, were forbidden; and, as playmates were few, the child lived in a world of fancy. "I was lonely," she said, "and I sought companions. What was there to do but to create them?" Indeed, before she was eight years old, her active mind was creating a world of its own in a little unwritten play, which it pleased her fancy to call a Spanish drama, and with which she spent all summer, filling it with personages. The rigid Calvinism of the family had undoubtedly a very stimulating effect on the emotions of the sensitive child, and to its far reaching influence may be ascribed the tinge of melancholy found in many of her pages. As a child, Moulton also exhibited a great vitality, especially when she was not burdened with the terrors of "damnation". Running in the face of a great wind was one of her joys, and she realized the reverse of such emotion in listening to the sound of the wind through an outer keyhole, which seemed to her the calling of trumpets, the crying of lost souls. She was sent to school at an early age, eventually becoming the pupil of the Rev. Roswell Park, at that time rector of the Episcopal church in Pomfret, and also the head of a school called Christ Church Hall. It was a school for boys as well as girls; and one of her schoolmates here, for a season, was James Abbott McNeill Whistler. She kept the pictures that he drew for her in those days. At the age of 15, Moulton began to publish the work which she had written for the past eight years. It would be difficult to say what it was that inclined her to a literary life as she had no literary friends. She felt her movements had to be secret as if she were committing a crime when she sent off her first verses to a daily paper published in Norwich, Connecticut. It was on her way from school one day that she happened to take the paper from the office; and, when she opened it, there were the lines she had written. Three years later, Messrs. Phillips, Sampson and Company, of Boston, published for her "This, That, and the Other," a collection of stories and poems which had appeared in various magazines and newspapers. Directly after the publication of this first book, Moulton went for a final school year to Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary in August 1854, finishing in 1855.

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. 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." She also wrote several volumes of prose fiction, including Miss Eyre from Boston and Other Stories, and some descriptions of travel, including Lazy Tours in Spain (1896). In this travel book she recounts her travels through Spain, Italy (Naples, Rome, Sorrento, Pompeii, Amalfi and Florence), France (Paris, Aix les Bains, Brides les Bains, and Savoy), Switzerland (Geneva, Lucerne, Chamouny and Ragatz), Germany (Nuremberg, Marienbad, Carlsbad, Frankfurt and Metz) and England (Yorkshire). In Spain she visited Irun, Burgos, Valladolid, Avila, El Escorial, Madrid, Toledo, Cordova, Granada and Seville. She was well known for the extent of her literary influence, the result of a sympathetic personality combined with fine critical taste.

Her home in Boston, after her marriage, was soon a centre of attraction; and, surrounded by friends, she exercised there a gracious hospitality, and met the men and women who made the Boston of that epoch famous. Here was born her daughter, Florence, who later married William Schaefer, of South Carolina. Here her husband died, and here she remained through the days of her widowhood till the house became historic. With the exception of the two years immediately following Mr. Moulton's death, when she remained at home and in seclusion, Moulton went abroad every summer. Every winter, she was back in Boston, where her house was a centre of literary life. She was the friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. in their lifetime, the acquaintance of George Henry Boker, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Russell Lowell, and John Boyle O'Reilly, and of Sarah Helen Whitman (the fiancée of Edgar Allan Poe), of Rose Terry Cooke and Nora Perry, of Stedman and Stoddard, Julia Ward Howe, Arlo Bates, Edward Everett Hale, William Dean Howells, William Winter, Anne Whitney, Alice Brown, Alicia Van Buren, and Louise Imogen Guiney. She was on pleasant terms with Sir Walter Besant, William Sharp, Dr. Horder, Mathilde Blind, Holman Hunt, Lucy Clifford, Rosa Campbell Praed, Coulson Kernahan, John Davidson, Kenneth Grahame, Richard Le Gallienne, Anthony Hope, Robert Smythe Hichens, William Watson, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Alice Meynell, as well as Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Jean Ingelow, Louisa May Alcott, and William Black. After a lengthy illness, she died in Boston on August 10, 1908. Lilian Whiting's biography (Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend. Illustrated. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1910) was direct and clear in its method, chronological and narrative rather than critical, compiled largely from the letters of Moulton and from the journal that was kept faithfully from age eight to the last days of failing health. With due acknowledgment of Moulton's gifts of personal charm and poetic sentiment and refinement, few discriminating readers ascribed to her verses that quality of genius. So it was considered unfortunate that Whiting began her biography with this word, as one of the implied characteristics of her subject. In her general treatment of Moulton's poetry, however, Whiting showed justice and reserve as well as sympathetic appreciation.