Of this breakfast an amusing reminiscence has been given by Mrs. Moulton herself:
"Shortly after I came into the room, Lord Houghton, whose voice was very low, brought a gentleman up to me whose name I failed to hear. My fellow-guest had a pleasant face, and was dressed in gray; he sat down beside me, and talked in a lively way on everyday topics until Lord Houghton came to take me in to table. Opposite to us sat Miss Milnes, now Lady Fitzgerald, between two gentlemen, one of whom was the man in gray. Presently Lord Houghton asked me if I thought Browning looked like his pictures. 'Browning?' I asked. 'Where is he?' 'Why, there, sitting beside my daughter,' he replied. But, as there were two gentlemen sitting beside Miss Milnes, I sat during the remainder of the breakfast with a divided mind, wondering which of these two men was Browning. After going back to the drawing-room my friend in gray again came and sat beside me, so I plucked up courage and said, 'I understand Mr. Browning is here; will you kindly tell me which he is?' He looked half puzzled, half amused, for a moment; then he called out to some one standing near, 'Look here, Mrs. Moulton wants to know which one of us is Browning. C'est moi!' he added with a gay gesture; and this is how my friendship with the author of 'Pippa Passes' began."
This introduction may be said to have "placed" Mrs. Moulton in English literary society, and there was hardly a person of intellectual distinction in London whom she did not meet. She came to know the Rossettis, William Sharp, Theodore Watts (later known as Watts-Dunton), Herbert E. Clarke, Mrs. W.K. Clifford, A. Mary F. Robinson (afterward Mme. Darmesteter), Olive Schreiner, Lewis Morris, William Bell Scott, the Hon. Roden Noel, Iza Duffus Hardy, Aubrey de Vere, the Marstons, father and son, and in short almost every writer worth knowing. She came, indeed, to belong almost as completely to the London literary world as to that of America.
Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet, whose friend and biographer she in time became, she first met on the first day of July of this year. She has recorded the meeting:
"It was just six weeks before his twenty-sixth birthday. He was tall, slight, and, in spite of his blindness, graceful. He seemed to me young-looking even for his twenty-six years. He had a noble and beautiful forehead. His brown eyes were perfect in shape, and even in color, save for a dimness like a white mist that obscured the pupil, but which you perceived only when you were quite near to him. His hair and beard were dark brown, with warm glints of chestnut; and the color came and went in his cheeks as in those of a sensitive girl. His face was singularly refined, but his lips were full and pleasure-loving, and suggested dumbly how cruel must be the limitations of blindness to a nature hungry for love and for beauty. I had been greatly interested, before seeing him, in his poems, and to meet him was a memorable delight.
"He and the sister, who was his inseparable companion, soon became my close friends, and with them both this friendship lasted till the end."
The poetry of Swinburne had for her a fascination from the first, and she was attracted also by the personality of the poet. Writing an article upon a new volume of his, she submitted the copy to him before publishing it in the Athenæum. His acknowledgment was as follows:
Mr. Swinburne to Mrs. Moulton
December 19, 1877.