Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend

BY
LILIAN WHITING
BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1910
Copyright, 1910 , By Little, Brown, and Company. All rights reserved Published, September, 1910 Printers S.J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U.S.A.

Louise Chandler Moulton, æt. 20
Frontispiece

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 lover of the beautiful. Poet born and poet made, she developed her natural lyric gift into a rare mastery of poetic art. She wore her singing-robes with an unconscious grace, and found in her power of song the determining influence which colored and shaped her life. Her lyrics were the spontaneous expression, the natural out-pouring, of a lofty and beautiful spirit. Her poetic instinct radiated in her ardent and generous sympathies, her exquisite interpretations of sentiment and feeling; it informed all her creative work with a subtle charm pervasive as the fragrance of a rose. Her artistic impulse was, indeed, the very mainspring of her life; it expressed itself not only in the specific forms of lyrics and of prose romance, but in her varied range of friendships and in her intense and discriminating love of literature. Mrs. Moulton was not of the order of the poet who
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 ministry. Her tenderness of feeling responded to every human need. Others might turn away from the unattractive; to her the simple fact that kindness was needed was a claim which she could not deny.