Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend

by Lilian Whiting

Because I seek Thee not, oh seek Thou me! Because my lips are dumb, oh hear the cry I do not utter as Thou passest by And from my life-long bondage set me free! Because, content, I perish far from Thee, Oh, seize me, snatch me from my fate, and try My soul in Thy consuming fire! Draw nigh And let me, blinded, Thy salvation see. If I were pouring at Thy feet my tears, If I were clamoring to see Thy face, I should not need Thee, Lord, as now I need, Whose dumb, dead soul knows neither hopes nor fears, Nor dreads the outer darkness of this place— Because I seek not, pray not, give Thou heed!

The deeply religious feeling, the profound sincerity, and what might perhaps not inaptly be called the completely modern mood of this, a mood which in its essence is permanent but which in its outward form varies with each generation, gave it a power of wide appeal. A church paper in England said of it:

"Profound faith in the infinite goodness of God is the spirit which animates most of Mrs. Moulton's work. The sonnet ... deserves a place among the best devotional verse in the language. It is a question if, outside of the volume of Miss Rossetti, any devotional verse to equal this can be found in the work of a living woman-writer."

The critic need hardly have limited himself to the poetry of women. Mrs. Moulton was all her life vitally interested in the religious side of life, and many more of her letters might have been quoted to show how constantly her mind returned to the question of immortality and human responsibility. The sonnet had become for her a natural mode of utterance, as it was for Mrs. Browning when she wrote the magnificent sequence which recorded her love; and in this especial poem is the essence of Mrs. Moulton's spiritual life.

Mrs. Moulton's mastery of the sonnet has been alluded to before, but as each new volume brought fresh proof of it, and as she went on producing work equally important, it is impossible not to refer to this form of her art again and again. Whittier wrote to her after the appearance of "In the Garden of Dreams": "It seems to me the sonnet was never set to such music before, nor ever weighted with more deep and tender thought;" and Miss Guiney, in a review, declared that "we rest with a steadfast pleasure on the sonnets, and in their masterly handling of high thoughts." Phrases of equal significance might be multiplied, and to them no dissenting voice could be raised.

In 1890 Mrs. Moulton brought out a volume of juvenile stories under the title "Stories Told at Twilight," and in 1896 this was followed by another with the name "In Childhood's Country." Always wholesome, kindly, attractive, these volumes had a marked success with the audience for which they were designed; and of few books written for children can or need more be said.

Among the letters of this period are a number from a correspondent signing "Pascal Germain." The writer had published a novel called "Rhea: a Suggestion," but his identity has not yet been made public. Mrs. Moulton never knew who he was, but apparently opened the correspondence in regard to something which struck her in the book. Some clews exist which might be followed up were one inclined to endeavor to solve the riddle. After the death of Carl Gutherz, the artist who painted the admirable decoration "Light" for the ceiling of the Reading-room in the Congressional Library in Washington, his daughter found among the papers of her father a post-card signed Pascal Germain, and written from Paris in the manner of a familiar friend. Evidently Mr. Gutherz had known the mysterious writer well, but the daughter had no clew by which to identify him.

A letter from Edward Stanton Huntington, author of "Dreams of the Dead," rather deepens than clears the mystery. The writer was a nephew of Bishop Huntington, and is not now living.