"Long, high, and altogether spacious and dignified. A library opening from the rear increases the apparent length of the apartment, so that it is a veritable salon; the furnishings are of simple elegance in color and design, and the whole scheme of decoration quiet and not ultra-modern.
"But in this attractive room are more treasures than one would dream of at first glance. The fine paintings that are scattered here, there, and everywhere, are all of them veritable works of art, presented to Mrs. Moulton by their painters; the etchings are autograph copies from some of the best masters of Europe. Almost every article of decoration, it would seem, has a history. The books that have overflowed from the dim recesses of the library are mostly presentation copies in beautiful bindings, with many a well-turned phrase on their fly leaves written by authors we all know and love.
"There could be no better guide through all this treasure-house of suggestive material than Mrs. Moulton herself. Without question she knows more English people of note than does any other living American. As she spreads out before the delighted caller her remarkable collection of presentation photographs, she intersperses the exhibit with brilliant off-hand descriptions of their originals—the sort of word-painting that bookmen are eager to hear in connection with their literary idols. It is the real Swinburne she brings to the mind's eye, with his extraordinary personal appearance and his weird manners; the real William Watson, profoundly in earnest and varying in moods; the real George Egerton, with her intensity and devotion to the higher rights of womankind; the real Thomas Hardy and George Meredith and Anthony Hope, and the whole band of British authors, big and little, whom she marshals in review and dissects with unerring perception and the keenest of wit. Anecdotes of all these personages flow from her tongue with a prodigality that makes one long for the art of shorthand to preserve them."
From this home in the early eighties the daughter of the house was married to Mr. William Henry Schaefer, of Charleston, South Carolina. In her daughter's removal to that Southern city, Mrs. Moulton's life found an extension of interests. She made frequent visits to Charleston before what now came to be her annual spring sailings to Europe. In her later years Mrs. Moulton and her daughter and son-in-law often travelled together, though Mrs. Moulton's enjoyment centred itself more and more, as the years went by, in her extensive and sympathetic social life. Always was she pre-eminently the poet and the friend; and travel became to her the means by which she arrived at her desired haven, rather than was indulged in for its own sake. Yet the lovely bits of description which abound in her writings show that she journeyed with the poet's eye; as, for instance, this on leaving Rome:
"The deep blue Italian sky seemed warm with love and life, the fountains tossed high their white spray and flashed in the sunshine. Peasants were milking their goats at the foot of the Spanish Steps. Flower-girls had their arms full of fresh flowers, with the dew still on them, loading the air with fragrance."
Or this of Florence:
"I never cross the Ponte Vecchio, or Jewellers' Bridge, in Florence, without thinking of Longfellow's noble sonnet, and quoting to myself:
'Taddeo Gaddi built me,—I am old.'
Nor could I ever approach the superb equestrian statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand without thinking of Browning's 'The Statue and the Bust.' 'The passionate pale lady's face' wrought by Lucca della Robbia no longer 'watches it from the square.'"