"Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part!
"Mocked by a day that shines no more on thee,
in the sonnet called 'The New Year Dawns,' is the very truth in the strong simplicity of the Elizabethan age.
"What a wonderful line is the last one of the sonnet, 'The Song of the Stars':
"The waking rapture, and the fair, far place."
The serenity and sweetness of Longfellow's verse are the natural expression of a life sweet and serene; and in the work of Mrs. Moulton the beauty of her work was in no less a measure the inevitable outcome of her character. She wrote so spontaneously that her poems seemed, as she used to say, "to come to her," and although she never spared the most careful polishing, yet her song seemed to spring without effort and almost without conscious prevision.
The literary life was to her in its outward aspect chiefly a matter of fit and harmonious companionship. She declared that she thought "the great charm of a literary life was that it made one acquainted with so many delightful people." Her warm sense of the personality and characteristics of the writers whom she met in London has been alluded to already, and some of her words about them have been quoted in a former chapter. Those who enjoyed the privilege of chatting with her in her morning-room were never tired of hearing her give her impressions of distinguished authors.
"George Meredith's talk," she said on one occasion, "is like his books, it is so scintillating, so epigrammatic. In talking with him you have to be swiftly attentive or you will miss some allusion or witticism, and seem disreputably inattentive."
"Thomas Hardy," she said again, "has the face, I think, which one would expect from his books. His forehead is so large and so fine that it seems to be half his face. His blue eyes are kindly, but they are extremely shrewd. You feel that he sees everything, and that because he would always understand he would always forgive. I have heard him called the shyest man in London, but he never impressed me so."
"I did not find George Eliot so plain a person as she is ordinarily represented," she replied to a question about that author. "To me she seemed to have a singularly interesting face and a lovely smile; and one distinctive trait, one peculiarly her own, was a very gentle and sweet deference of manner. In any difference of opinion, she always began by agreeing with the person with whom she was conversing, as 'I quite see that, but don't you think—' and then there would follow a statement so supremely convincing, so comprehensive, so true, so sweetly suggestive, that one could not help being convinced. It was like a fair mist over a background of the greatest strength."