Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend

The place of Louise Chandler Moulton as a writer is assured. The words of the London Athenæum in its memorial notice may be said to sum up the matter with entire justice when it said that her work "entitles her to her recognized position as the first poet, among women," in America, from the fact that her verse possesses "delicate and rare beauty, marked originality, and, what was better still, … a sense of vivid and subtle imagination, and that spontaneous feeling which is the essence of lyrical poetry." Her mastery of the sonnet-form has been commented upon in the words of critics of authority a number of times already in this volume, and neither this nor her wonderful instinct for metrical effect need be dwelt upon here. That she has left her place in American letters unfilled, and that no successor is in evidence will hardly be disputed. Few writers of equal eminence have so completely escaped from all trace of mannerism, for unless a tendency to melancholy might be so classed her poetry is unusually free from this fault. The imaginative spontaneity of her verse made it impossible for artificiality to intrude; and even the sadness never seems forced or affected. The beauty of feeling and the exquisite melody of her verse have in them the savor of immortality.

To her friends the remembrance of her genius for friendship,—for it amounted to that,—her wonderful and unworldly kindness which overflowed in all her acts, the sympathy which no demands could exhaust, must seem hardly less a title to continued remembrance than her poetic powers. Her life was singularly complete, singularly fortunate, in its conditions. It was a life enriched with genius, friendship, and love, and above all it was the life of one whose nature was golden throughout with the appreciation of beauty and the instinctive generosity which gave as freely as it had received.

She had entered into the larger life where

No work begun shall ever pause for death,

and where all the nobler energies of the spirit shall enter into eternal beauty.