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Strangely enough this was Mr. Moulton's last evening of being in health. The next day he was taken ill, and on February 19, 1898, he passed into "the life more abundant." The funeral service was read by the Rev. E. Winchester Donald, rector of Trinity, and Mrs. Moulton more than once spoke of the kindness and sympathy which he showed to her at this time. She wrote in her diary: "Dr. Donald called; he is, it seems to me, a nobly good man." Her daughter was with her, and her many friends were about her. Numerous were the letters of condolence, and they were full of the genuine feeling which could be called out only by one who was herself so ready and quick to respond to the sorrows of others.
In the summer following Mr. Moulton's death Mrs. Moulton remained in America. Her life was saddened and cumbered with the cares needful in business matters, and on the last day of the year she wrote in her diary: "This sad year which is now ending—how strange a year it has been for me. Mr. Moulton died in February and changed all. I have done nothing, enjoyed nothing. With 1899 I must turn over a new leaf, or give up life and all its uses, altogether." In this mood it was natural that her predisposition to brood upon the problem of death should reassert itself. She writes to William Winter: "No,—my dread of death does not seem to me to be physical, for it is not the pain of death that I ever think of. I hate the idea of extinction, but I could reconcile myself to that; ... but what I dread most is the to-morrow of death,—the loneliness of the unclothed soul." And again: "For myself, I have an unutterable and haunting horror of going out into the dark.... I always wish I might die at the same moment with some well beloved friend, so that hand and hand we might go into the mystery."
Her literary work, however, continues. She said from time to time that she could not write, and that she should never write a line again; but the poetic instinct was strong, and asserted itself in its own time and way. In a letter to a friend she remarks in passing: "The Century has just come with my poem, 'A Rose Pressed in a Book,' and it seems to me to read pretty well." The lyric to which she modestly alludes as reading "pretty well" is beautifully characteristic of some of her choicest poetic qualities: easy and seemingly unconscious mastery of form, delicacy of touch, charming melody, and sincerity of emotion.
Always her correspondence goes on.
T.B. Aldrich to Mrs. Moulton
"Some day I must get you to tell me about Andrew Lang. One night last winter as I sat reading one of his books a kind of ghost, distinct, elusive, rose before me. Out of this impression grew my 'Broken Music.'"
In allusion to his much discussed "Modern Love," George Meredith writes:
George Meredith to Mrs. Moulton
"You are like the northern tribes of the Arabs, in that what you love you love wholly and without ceasing. This poem has been more roundly abused than any other of my much-castigated troop. You help me to think that they are not born offenders, antipathetic to the human mind. Americans who first gave me a reputation for the writing of novels will perhaps ultimately take part in the admission that I can write verse. They may thus carry a reluctant consent in England, when I no longer send out my rhyming note for revision. I have been taught, at least, to set no store upon English opinion in such matters. I would thank you, but gratitude is out of place. There is a feeling hard to verbalize."