"I sat close to the platform, thoroughly entranced, and longing to speak to him—this great man! longing with all a romantic schoolgirl's ardor and capacity for hero-worship. I never missed a lecture. The last day and the last lecture came, and as Mr. Thackeray came from the platform he bent toward me and said: 'I shall miss the kind, encouraging face that has sat beneath me for so many hours'; and I was too surprised to be able to answer him a word. But it is a memory that has never left me."
Boston in the fifties had little to boast of in the artistic line. Henry James, writing of Hawthorne's time, noted with amusement the devotion to the "attenuated outlines" of Flaxman's drawings. The classic old Athenæum contained practically all that the city could offer in the way of art. Here were some casts from antique marbles, specimens of the work of Greenough and Thorwaldsen, a certain number of dull busts of interesting men, a supply of engravings, and a small collection of paintings. The paintings were largely copies, but included originals by Allston, Copley, and a few others.
In music the taste was pure, if the opportunities were but provincial. Grisi and Mario in brief visits delighted the town in opera; the Handel and Haydn Society provided oratorio; the Harvard Orchestra gave instrumental concerts. In the spring of 1856 was held a Beethoven Festival, and the bronze statue, so long familiar in the old Boston Music Hall, was inaugurated with a poem by the sculptor, William Wetmore Story.
In intellectual life Boston had long been distinguished among American cities. In these early years of Mrs. Moulton's life here Lowell gave his course of lectures on "Poetry" before the Lowell Institute, and Curtis his course on "Bulwer and Disraeli." Longfellow at this time was writing "Hiawatha"; Richard Grant White was often coming over from New York to confer with the Cambridge group on nice points in his edition of Shakespeare. The interest in literature is illustrated by the fact that when "Maud" appeared in the summer of 1855 Longfellow and George William Curtis made a pilgrimage to Newport to read and discuss it with Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. The aristocratic ideal in the world into which Mrs. Moulton had come was distinctly intellectual rather than plutocratic.
The year of her marriage was also the year of the publication of her second book, a novel entitled "Juno Clifford," which was brought out anonymously by the Appletons. Again the praise of the reviewers was practically unanimous. A Boston critic wrote: "The authorship is a mystery which perhaps time will unravel, for rumor is ascribing it to lofty names in the world of literature"; and George D. Prentice, in the Louisville Journal, in less journalistic phrase, characterized the story as having "numerous points of strange beauty and a strange pathos."
Among the sympathetic friends who at this time enriched Mrs. Moulton's life none was of personality more striking than Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, whose connection with Poe was at once so touching and so tragic. "No person ever made on me so purely spiritual an impression," wrote Mrs. Moulton in The Athenæum in after years, "as did Mrs. Whitman. One of her friends said of her: 'She is nothing but a soul with a sweet voice.'" Some of the poems signed "Ellen Louise" had attracted the attention of Mrs. Whitman, and a correspondence followed. In a postscript to the first letter written to Mrs. Moulton after her marriage, Mrs. Whitman says:
"You ask my plans. I have none nor ever had. All my life I have been one of those who walk by faith and not by sight. I never can plan ahead. The first words I ever learned to speak were caught from hearing the watchman call out in the middle of the night, 'All's well.' This has always been my great article of faith. An angel seems ever to turn for me at the right time the mystic pages of the book of life, while I stand wondering and waiting,—that is all."
On the appearance of "Juno Clifford," Mrs. Whitman wrote:
Mrs. Whitman to Mrs. Moulton