is immense. Lines with the lyric quality of that are imperishable. Quite apart from its meaning—its cold meaning—it is poetry. It floods the heart. It carries all before it. There is no stopping it. It is like the opening of the gates of the sea. You often write such lines.' The line does not seem to me at all worth such praise, but all the same the praise pleased me. How lovely it is to have people single out some special phrase to care for!"
"Louise Guiney and I are looking over my poems together. Oh, I wish there were more variety in them. They are good (I hope and think) in form, but they are, almost all, the cry of my heart for the love that I long for, or its protest against the death that I fear. Ah, well, I can only be myself."
Louise Chandler Moulton
Page 227
In this year appeared Mrs. Moulton's third volume of poems, "At the Wind's Will," the title being taken from Rossetti's "Wood-spurge":
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I had walked on at the wind's will,— I sat now, for the wind was still. |
Of it Mrs. Spofford said:
"Mrs. Moulton's last volume of poems, 'At the Wind's Will,' fitly crowns the literary achievement of the century. It is poetry at high-water mark. Her work exhibited in previous volumes has given her a rank among the foremost poets of the world, and much of the work in 'At the Wind's Will' exceeds in grasp and in surrender, in strength and in beauty, anything she has hitherto published."
So the year wore to a close. Her last record for December in her diary reads: "Now this year of 1899 goes out,—a year in which I have accomplished nothing,—gone back, I fear, in every way. God grant 1900 may be better." In part this was the expression of the melancholy natural to ill health, but it was a characteristic cry from one always too likely to underrate herself. Surely the prayer was granted, for the year 1900 gave her again a spring in Rome and Florence, and was filled with rich and significant experiences.