Many of her reminiscences which entered into the talk have been told in her newspaper letters, and need not be repeated here, but they took on a fresh vitality from the living voice and the gracious, unaffected manner.
By some untraced or unanalyzed impulse Mrs. Moulton was apt to be moved on each New Year's day to write a poem. Usually this was a sonnet, but now and then a lyric instead; and for many years the first entry in the fresh volume of her diary records the fact. On the first of January, 1890, she writes:
"Began the New Year by writing a sonnet, to be called 'How Shall We Know,' unless I can find a better title."
"The Last Good-bye" was the title upon which she afterward fixed.
On the fifth day of January of this year died Dr. Westland Marston. Mrs. Moulton wrote in her Herald letters a review of his life and work, in the course of which she said with touching earnestness:
"I scarcely know a life which has been so tragic as his in the way of successive bereavements; and when I think of him as I saw him last, on the first day of last November—in his solitary library, with the pictures of those he had loved and lost on its walls, and with only their ghosts for his daily company—I almost feel that, for his own sake, I ought to be glad that he has gone to join the beloved ones whom one can easily fancy making festival of welcome for him."
Her intimacy had been close with all the family, and while Edmund Gosse was right when he wrote to her that she seemed to him always to have been "Philip's true guardian-ray, or better genius," her friendship for Cecily Marston, for Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, and with Dr. Marston himself was hardly less close. The tragic ending of the family could not but cast a bleak shade over the opening year.
Her relations with English writers and the good offices by which she helped to make their work better known on this side of the Atlantic might be illustrated by numerous letters.
Richard Garnett to Mrs. Moulton
British Museum, London,
August 4, 1890.