Emerson has declared that comforts and advantages are good if one does not use them as a cushion on which to go to sleep. With Mrs. Moulton her native gifts seemed to generate aspiration and effort for noble achievement.

Among the schoolmates of her childish years was the boy who was afterward the artist Whistler, who was one year her senior. As children they often walked home from school together, and one night the little girl was bewailing that she could not draw a map like the beautiful one he had displayed to an admiring group that day. It was a gorgeous creation in colored crayons, an "arrangement" that captivated the village school with much the same ardor that the future artist was destined to inspire from the art connoisseurs of two continents. A sad object, indeed, was the discordant affair that Ellen Louise held up in self-abasement and hopelessness while she poured out her enthusiasm on his achievement. The lad received this praise with lofty scorn. "That's nothing," he exclaimed; "you think this is anything? Take it; I don't want it; you just see what I can do to-morrow! I'll bring you then something worth talking about." And with the precious trophy in her possession, the little girl made her way home. True to his word, the next morning "Jimmy" brought her a package whose very wrapping revealed the importance of its contents; and when she had breathlessly opened it, there was disclosed an exquisite little painting. Under a Gothic arch that breathed—no one knew what enchanted hints of "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," or some far-away dreams of Venice, or other dimly prefigured marvel in the child's fancy, was an old monk; through the picture were silver gleams, and a vague glint of purple, and altogether, it held some far prophecy of the brilliant future yet undisclosed. All her life Mrs. Moulton kept the gift. It had an unobtrusive place in her drawing-room, and even figured modestly at the great Whistler exhibition which was held in Boston by the Copley Society after the death of the artist.

In some ways Ellen Louise had a rather lonely childhood save that an imaginative and poetic nature peoples a world of its own. The little girl had, as it chanced, no playmates near at hand to supply the place of brothers and sisters; and her companions were those that fancy created. In later years she wrote of this period:

"I never felt alone. Dream children companioned me, and were as real to my thoughts as if other eyes than my own could have seen them. Their sorrows saddened me, their mirth amused me, they shared my visions, my hopes; and the strange dread with which I—brought up in a Puritan household where election and predestination were familiar words—looked forward to the inevitable end.

"Yet haunted as I was by the phantom future, I was happy in the present. I am afraid I was what is called a spoiled child. I loved horses and I loved verses, and on my eighth birthday two presents were made me—a well-equipped saddle horse, and a book of poems. The horse ran away with me that same afternoon while my too sociable father, who was riding with me, stopped to talk town politics with a neighbor; but my steed raced homeward, and I reached my own door in safety. The book of verse I have yet. It was by Mrs. Hemans—now so cruelly forgotten."

Her imaginative nature showed itself in many ways. She says:

"I was not allowed to read fiction or to play any but the most serious games.... Hence I was thrown upon my own resources for amusement. I remember when I was only eight years old carrying in my head all the summer a sort of Spanish drama, as I called it, though I knew little of Spain except some high-sounding Spanish names which I gave to my characters. Each day, as soon as I could get away by myself, I summoned these characters as if my will had been a sort of invisible call-boy, and then watched them performing. It did not seem to me that I created them, but rather that I summoned them, and their behavior often astonished me. For one of them, a young girl, who obstinately persisted in dying of consumption, I sincerely grieved."

She had written from the age of seven verses which would hardly have discredited her maturer years. A stanza written when she was nine runs:

Autumn is a pleasant time
Breathing beauty in our clime;
Even its flowerets breathe of love
Which is sent us from above.