"It is not too much to say of these poems that they exhibit delicate and rare beauty, marked originality, and perfection of style. What is still better, they impress us with a sense of subtle and vivid imagination, and that spontaneous feeling which is the essence of lyrical poetry.... A poem called 'The House of Death' is a fine example of the writer's best style. It paints briefly, but with ghostly fidelity, the doomed house, which stands blind and voiceless amid the light and laughter of summer. The lines which we print in italics show a depth of suggestion and a power of epithet which it would be difficult to surpass.
"THE HOUSE OF DEATH
|
"Not a hand has lifted the latchet, Since she went out of the door,— No footsteps shall cross the threshold, Since she can come in no more. "There is rust upon locks and hinges, And mould and blight on the walls, And silence faints in the chambers, And darkness waits in the halls,— "Waits, as all things have waited, Since she went, that day of spring, Borne in her pallid splendour, To dwell in the Court of the King; "With lilies on brow and bosom, With robes of silken sheen, And her wonderful frozen beauty The lilies and silk between.... "The birds make insolent music Where the sunshine riots outside; And the winds are merry and wanton, With the summer's pomp and pride. "But into this desolate mansion, Where Love has closed the door, Nor sunshine nor summer shall enter, Since she can come in no more." |
Philip Bourke Marston wrote a long review of the volume in The Academy, London, in the course of which he admirably summarized the merits of the work when he said:
"The distinguishing qualities of these poems are extreme directness and concentration of utterance, unvarying harmony between thought and expression, and a happy freedom from that costly elaboration of style so much in vogue.... Yet, while thus free from elaboration, Mrs. Moulton's style displays rare felicity of epithet.... The poetical faculty of the writer is in no way more strongly evinced than by the subtlety and suggestiveness of her ideas."
The reviewers of note on both sides of the Atlantic were unanimous in their praise. In a time of æsthetic imitation she came as an absolutely natural singer. She gave the effect of the sudden note of a thrush heard through a chorus of mocking-birds and piping bullfinches. She was able to put herself into her work and yet to keep her poetry free from self-consciousness; and to be at once spontaneous and impassioned is given to few writers of verse. When such a power belongs to an author the verse becomes poetry.
Mrs. Moulton had already come to regard Robert Browning as, in her own phrase, "king of contemporary poets." She sent to him a copy of "Swallow Flights," with a timid, graceful note asking for his generosity. In his acknowledgment he said:
Mr. Browning to Mrs. Moulton
19 Warwick Crescent, W.
February 24, '78.