It is not to be wondered that the artist wrote in warm acknowledgment:
Mr. Burne-Jones to Mrs. Moulton
"I think you must know how glad all workers are of such sympathy as you have shown me, and I don't know of any other reward that one ever sets before one's self that can be compared for a moment with the gratified sense of being understood. It's like hearing one's tongue in a foreign land. I do assure you I worked all the more confidently the day your letter came. Confidence and courage do often fail, and when all the senses are thoroughly tired with work, and the heart discouraged, a tribute like the one you sent me is a real refreshment."
During all these years Mrs. Moulton's mastery of technical form, and especially her efficiency in the difficult art of the sonnet, had steadily increased. George H. Boker wrote to her: "In your ability to make the sonnet all it should be you surpass all your living, tuneful sisterhood." Certainly after the death of Mrs. Browning no woman writing English verse could be named as Mrs. Moulton's possible rival in the sonnet save Christina Rossetti, and no woman in America, if indeed any man, could rank with her in this.
In many of Mrs. Moulton's sonnets is found a subtle, elusive suggestion of spiritual things, as if the poet were living between the two worlds of the seen and the unseen, with half-unconscious perceptions, strange and swift, of the unknown. With this spiritual outlook are mingled human love and longing. The existence of any genuine poet must be dual. He holds two kinds of experience, one that has been lived in outward life; the other, not less real, that has been lived intuitively and through the power of entering, by sympathy, into other lives and varied qualities of experience.
Mrs. Moulton's imaginative work, both in her stories and her poems, suggests this truth in a remarkable degree. Her nature presents a sensitive surface to impressions. She has the artist's power of selection from these, and the executive gift to combine, arrange, and present. Thus her spiritual receptivity gives to her work that deep vitality, that sense of soul in it that holds the reader, while her artistic touch moulds her rare and exquisite beauty of finished design.
In 1889 Mrs. Moulton published another volume of collected tales, the last that she made. It was entitled "Miss Eyre from Boston, and Other Stories." Her natural power and grace in fiction made these charming, but it is by her poetry rather than by her prose that she will be remembered. To her verse she gave her whole heart. To her short stories only, so to say, her passing fancy.
On her way north from a visit to her daughter in Charleston, Mrs. Moulton saw Walt Whitman. Little as she could be in sympathy with his chaotic art-notions, she was much impressed by his personality. Her diary records:
"Went with Talcott Williams to see Walt Whitman, a grand, splendid old man. He sat in the most disorderly room I ever saw, but he made it a temple for his greatness. He expounded his theories of verse; he spoke of his work, of his boyhood; of his infirmities merely by way of excuse for his difficulty in moving, and he gave me a book. He was altogether delightful."
From the diary one gets a curiously vivid impression that Mrs. Moulton's work was done in the very midst of interruptions and almost in an atmosphere so markedly social that it might seem to be utterly incompatible with imaginative production. Of course, a large number of those whom she saw most intimately were concerned chiefly with the artistic side of life, and this in a measure explains the anomaly; but the fact remains that she had an extraordinary power of doing really fine work in scraps and intervals of time which would to most writers have seemed completely inadequate.