Mrs. Moulton to Lady Lindsay
"I am reading, with very unusual interest, 'Blake of Oriel,' by Adeline Sargent. It is a story of fate and of heredity, which sets one thinking and questioning.... Is fate also to be complicated by the curse of evil inheritance? Oh, is it fair to give life to one with such an inheritance of evil, and then condemn the sinner for what he does? Is it?... Is it a loving God who creates men foreknowing that they will commit spiritual suicide?... Are people sinners who are doomed by heredity to sin?"
Arthur Christopher Benson to Mrs. Moulton
"Thank you for what you say of my 'Arthur Hamilton.' It is deeply gratifying to me that the book has ever so slightly interested you. As for the difficulties of the hero, I suppose they are the eternal difficulties. It was like my impudent youth to think that to no one else had the same problem been so unjustly presented before, and to rush wildly into a tourney."
The summer of 1900 Mrs. Moulton passed abroad, going before her London visit for the spring in Italy. She revisited familiar haunts in Rome and Florence, and again was steeped in the enchantment of Italy. In Rome she loved especially the gardens of the Villa Ludovisi; and indeed, something in the solemn spell she felt in the Eternal City appealed especially to her nature. The roses and the ruins, the antique and the modern; churches and altars and temples, and modern studios and society,—each, in turn, attracted her. She passed hours in the Vatican galleries; she was fond of driving on the Pincian in the late afternoon; she took a child's joy in the festas; she found delight in the works growing under the hand of artists. Of a visit to the studio of Mr. Story she related: "I was looking at a noble statue of Saul, and this, recalling to me the 'Saul' of Browning, led me to speak of the dead poet. Mr. Story then told me of his own last meeting with Browning, which was at Asolo. It was but a short time before Browning's death, and the two old friends were talking over all sorts of intimate things, and finally Mr. Story entered his carriage to drive away. Browning, who had bade him good-bye and turned away, suddenly came back, and reached his hand into the carriage, grasping that of Story, and looking into the sculptor's eyes exclaimed, 'Friends for forty years! Forty years without a break.' Then with a last good-bye he turned away, and the two friends never met again."
After the London visit, Mrs. Moulton went for the cure at Aix-les-Bains, perhaps as much for the delightful excursions of the neighborhood as in any hope of help for her almost constant ill-health. Thence she went in September to Paris, still in the full glory of its Exposition year. While in Paris she received from Professor Meiklejohn the comments upon her latest volume, "At the Wind's Will." He had fallen into the custom of going over her poems carefully, and of sending her his notes of admiration. "I still maintain," he wrote her on this occasion, "that your brothers are the Elizabethan lyrists, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Vaughan." Some of the comments were these:
"In 'When Love is Young,' the line
"Time has his will of every man,