Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend

T.W. Higginson to Mrs. Moulton

Cambridge, May 3, 1887.

Dear Friend: I gladly join with others in this mid-ocean post-bag. I hope you will take your instalments of friendship in as many successive days. Few American women,—perhaps none,—have succeeded in establishing such a pleasant intermedian position before English and American literature as have you, and as the ocean does not limit your circle of friends, it seems very proper that we on this side should stretch our hands to you across it. As one of your oldest and best friends, I wish you not only "many happy returns," but one, at least, in the autumn.

Ever cordially,

T.W. Higginson.

On the other side of the Atlantic Philip Bourke Marston and his friend William Sharp greeted her return to London in three sonnets.

Philip Bourke Marston to Mrs. Moulton

UNDESCRIED.—TO L.C.M

 
When from her world, new world, she sailed away,
Right out into the sea-winds and the sea,
Did no foreshadowing of good to be
Surprise my heart? That memorable day
Did I as usual rise, think, do, and say
As on a day of no import to me?
Did hope awake no least low melody?
Send forth no spell my wandering steps to stay?
Oh, could our souls catch music of the things
From some lone height of being undescried,
Then had I heard the song the sea-wind sings
The waves; and through the strain of storm and tide,—
As soft as sleep and pure as lovely springs,—
Her voice wherein all sweetnesses abide.
 

William Sharp to Mrs. Moulton

ANTICIPATED FRIENDSHIP

 
Friend of my friend! as yet to me unknown,
Shall we twain meeting meet and care no more?
Already thou hast left thy native shore,
And to thine ears the laughter and the moan
Of the strange sea by night and day unknown,
Its thunder and its music and its roar;
A few days hence the journey will be o'er,
And I shall know if hopes have likewise flown.
As one hears by the fire a father tell
His eager child some tales of fairy land,
Where no grief is and no funereal bell,
But thronging joys and many a happy band;
So do I hope fulfillment will be well,
And not scant grace, with cold, indifferent hand.
 

AFTER MEETING

 
Friend of my friend, the looked-for day has come,
And we have met: to me, at least, a day
Memorable: no hopes have flown away.
Bad fears lie broken, stricken henceforth dumb:
In the thronged room, and in the ceaseless hum
Of many voices, I heard one voice say
A few brief words,—but words that did convey
A subtle breath of friendship, as in some
Few scattered leaves the rose still gives her scent.
Thy hand has been in mine, and I this night
Have seen thine eyes reach answer eloquent
To unseen questions winged for eager flight.
And when, at last, our Philip and I went,
I knew that I had won a fresh delight.
 

The following letter from Mr. Sharp explains itself in this cluster of greetings:

William Sharp to Philip Bourke Marston

19 Albert Street, Regent's Park.

Dear Philip: I couldn't be bothered going out anywhere, as you suggested, and an hour or two ago I was able to complete a second sonnet for the two on "Anticipated Friendship" addressed to Mrs. Moulton. I told you how much I liked her, and what a relief it was to find my hopes not disappointed. In reading these sonnets (at least, the second one) remember the dolorous condition I am in, and have mercy on all short-comings that therein abound; and, please, if you think the spirit of thankfulness in them not sufficient to overbalance all deficiencies, throw them in the fire without showing them to their unconscious inspirer, and thus earn the future gratitude of

Your loving friend,

William Sharp.

In February of 1887 Philip Bourke Marston died. He bequeathed to Mrs. Moulton his books and manuscripts, and many autographs of great interest and value. Among them was the first page of the original manuscript of the first great chorus in "Atalanta in Calydon" corrected in Swinburne's own hand. Marston requested that she should be his literary executor. Speaking of this work some years later, Mrs. Moulton said:

"When I first knew the Marstons they were a group of five,—dear old Dr. Marston, his son, Philip Bourke Marston, his unmarried daughter Cecily, his married daughter Mrs. Arthur O'Shaughnessy, and her husband. I edited a volume of selections by O'Shaughnessy; and I was named by Mr. Marston, in his will, as his literary executor. I brought out after his death a volume whose contents had not been hitherto included in any book, and which I called 'A Last Harvest.' Then I put all his flower-poems together (as he had long wished to do) in a volume by themselves, which was entitled 'Garden Secrets.' Finally I have brought out a collected edition of his poems, including the three volumes published before his death, and the ones I had compiled after he died.

"Ah, you may well call his life tragic. He was only three years old when he lost his sight. He was educated orally, but his knowledge of literature was a marvel. The poets of the past were his familiar friends, and he could repeat Swinburne's poems by the hour. To recite Rossetti's 'House of Life' was one of the amusements of his solitary days. But he longed, beyond all things, to be constantly in touch with the world—to know what every year, every month, was producing. 'Can you fancy what it is,' he would say to me sometimes, 'to be just walled in with books that you are dying to read, and to have them as much beyond your reach as if they were the other side of the world?' Yet he had, despite his sad fate, the gayest humor—the most naturally cheerful temperament; he could be so merry with his friends—so happy 'when there was anything to be happy about.' Of his work 'Garden Secrets' is uniquely charming. Rossetti once wrote him, in a letter of which I am the fortunate possessor, that he had been reading these 'Garden Secrets,' the evening before, to William Bell Scott, the poet-artist, and adds, 'Scott fully agreed with me that they were worthy of Shakespeare, in his subtlest lyrical moods.' Some of the best critics in London declared that the author of 'Song-Tide' (Marston's first volume) should, by virtue of this one book, take equal rank with Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti. Certainly his subsequent volumes fully sustained the promise of this first one, and I feel that when Philip Bourke Marston died, at the age of thirty-seven, on the fourteenth of February, 1887, England lost one of her noblest and subtlest poets—one whose future promise it were hard to overrate. Sometimes I think I care most for some of his sonnets; then the subtle beauty of his lyrics upbraids me,—and I hardly know which to choose. Take him all in all, he seems to me a poet whom future generations will recognize and remember."

Regarding the death of Mr. Marston, Mr. Whittier wrote to the friend who had brought so much brightness into the life of the blind poet:

Mr. Whittier to Mrs. Moulton

Centre Harbor, N.H., 7th month, 1887.

My dear Friend, Louise Chandler Moulton: It was very kind in thee to send thy admirable little book and most welcome letter. We have read thy wise and charming essay up here among the hills, and under the shadow of the pines, with hearty approval. It was needed, and will do a great deal of good to young people, in the matter of manners and morals.

It seems a very long time since I had the great pleasure of seeing thee, or of hearing directly from thee. I meant to have been in Boston in the early spring, and looked forward to the satisfaction of meeting thee, but I was too ill to leave home, and I felt a real pang of regret when I learned of thy departure. I am now much better, but although I cannot say with the Scotch poet that

 
"the years hang o'er my back
And bend me like a muckle pack,"
 

I must still confess that they are getting uncomfortably heavy. But I have no complaint to make. My heart is as warm as ever, and love and friendship as dear.

I was pained by the death of thy friend, Philip Marston. It must be a comfort to thee to know that thy love and sympathy made his sad lot easier to be borne. He was one who needed love, and I think he was one to inspire it also.

My old and comfortable hotel at Centre Harbor, where I have been a guest for forty years, was burned to ashes a few days ago, after we came away. But we are now in good, neat quarters at a neat farm house, with large cool rooms on the border of the lovely lake.

Good-bye, dear friend! While enjoying thy many friends in London, do not forget thy friends here.

Ever affectionately thy old friend,

John G. Whittier.

Herbert E. Clarke, the warm and intimate friend of Marston, touchingly alludes to his death in this sonnet.

TO LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON

 
Ah, friend, the die is cast,—life turns to prose.
My way lies onward—dusty, hot, and bare,
Through the wide plain under the noonday glare,—
A sordid path whereby no singer goes;
For yon the cloudy crags—the stars and snows—
Limitless freedom of ethereal air
And pinnacles near heaven. On foot I fare,
Halting foredoomed, and toward what goal who knows?
But though the singer who may sing no more
Bears ever in his heart a smothered fire,
I give Fate thanks: nor these my pangs deplore,
Seeing song gave first rewards beyond desire—
Your love, O Friend, and his who went before,
The sightless singer with his silver lyre.
 

London, 1st August, 1888.

To Arlo Bates, Mrs. Moulton, reading this, repeated the closing line with a touching tenderness, and then without further word laid the manuscript aside.

In the middle years of the eighties Mrs. Moulton began to send to the Boston Herald a series of literary letters from London, and these she continued for a number of years. She was especially well fitted for the undertaking by her wide acquaintance with English writers, her unusual power of appreciating work not yet endorsed by public approval, and her sympathetic instinct for literary quality. The work, while arduous, gave her pleasure, chiefly because it provided opportunity for her to give encouragement and aid to others, and to help to make better known writers and work not yet appreciated in America. "I am sending a literary letter each week to the Boston Herald," she writes Mr. Stedman. "It is hard work, but it gives me the pleasure of expressing myself about the current literature. I believe the letters are accounted a success."

Many were the letters of gratitude which came to her from those of whom she had written. The sympathetic quality of her approval, so rarely found in combination with critical judgment, made her praise especially grateful. Not only did she interest and enlighten her reading public, but she encouraged and inspired those of whom she wrote.

Other letters of grateful recognition came now and then from artists of whose work she had written in verse. After a visit to the studio of Burne-Jones in London she was inspired to write the admirable and subtle lyric "Laus Veneris," upon his picture of that name.

 
Pallid with too much longing,
White with passion and prayer,
Goddess of love and beauty,
She sits in the picture there,—
 
 
Sits with her dark eyes seeking
Something more subtle still
Than the old delights of loving
Her measureless days to fill.
 
 
She has loved and been loved so often,
In the long, immortal years,
That she tires of the worn-out rapture,
Sickens of hopes and fears.
 
 
No joys or sorrows move her,
Done with her ancient pride;
For her head she found too heavy
The crown she has cast aside.
 
 
Clothed in her scarlet splendor,
Bright with her glory of hair,
Sad that she is not mortal,—
Eternally sad and fair,—
 
 
Longing for joys she knows not,
Athirst with a vain desire,
There she sits in the picture,
Daughter of foam and fire.
 

It is not to be wondered that the artist wrote in warm acknowledgment:

Mr. Burne-Jones to Mrs. Moulton

"I think you must know how glad all workers are of such sympathy as you have shown me, and I don't know of any other reward that one ever sets before one's self that can be compared for a moment with the gratified sense of being understood. It's like hearing one's tongue in a foreign land. I do assure you I worked all the more confidently the day your letter came. Confidence and courage do often fail, and when all the senses are thoroughly tired with work, and the heart discouraged, a tribute like the one you sent me is a real refreshment."

During all these years Mrs. Moulton's mastery of technical form, and especially her efficiency in the difficult art of the sonnet, had steadily increased. George H. Boker wrote to her: "In your ability to make the sonnet all it should be you surpass all your living, tuneful sisterhood." Certainly after the death of Mrs. Browning no woman writing English verse could be named as Mrs. Moulton's possible rival in the sonnet save Christina Rossetti, and no woman in America, if indeed any man, could rank with her in this.

In many of Mrs. Moulton's sonnets is found a subtle, elusive suggestion of spiritual things, as if the poet were living between the two worlds of the seen and the unseen, with half-unconscious perceptions, strange and swift, of the unknown. With this spiritual outlook are mingled human love and longing. The existence of any genuine poet must be dual. He holds two kinds of experience, one that has been lived in outward life; the other, not less real, that has been lived intuitively and through the power of entering, by sympathy, into other lives and varied qualities of experience.

Mrs. Moulton's imaginative work, both in her stories and her poems, suggests this truth in a remarkable degree. Her nature presents a sensitive surface to impressions. She has the artist's power of selection from these, and the executive gift to combine, arrange, and present. Thus her spiritual receptivity gives to her work that deep vitality, that sense of soul in it that holds the reader, while her artistic touch moulds her rare and exquisite beauty of finished design.

In 1889 Mrs. Moulton published another volume of collected tales, the last that she made. It was entitled "Miss Eyre from Boston, and Other Stories." Her natural power and grace in fiction made these charming, but it is by her poetry rather than by her prose that she will be remembered. To her verse she gave her whole heart. To her short stories only, so to say, her passing fancy.

On her way north from a visit to her daughter in Charleston, Mrs. Moulton saw Walt Whitman. Little as she could be in sympathy with his chaotic art-notions, she was much impressed by his personality. Her diary records:

"Went with Talcott Williams to see Walt Whitman, a grand, splendid old man. He sat in the most disorderly room I ever saw, but he made it a temple for his greatness. He expounded his theories of verse; he spoke of his work, of his boyhood; of his infirmities merely by way of excuse for his difficulty in moving, and he gave me a book. He was altogether delightful."

From the diary one gets a curiously vivid impression that Mrs. Moulton's work was done in the very midst of interruptions and almost in an atmosphere so markedly social that it might seem to be utterly incompatible with imaginative production. Of course, a large number of those whom she saw most intimately were concerned chiefly with the artistic side of life, and this in a measure explains the anomaly; but the fact remains that she had an extraordinary power of doing really fine work in scraps and intervals of time which would to most writers have seemed completely inadequate.

"Full of interruptions, but managed to get written an editorial entitled 'A Post Too Late.'"

"Went to Lady Seton's breakfast-party and sat beside Oswald Crawfurd. In the morning before I went out at all I wrote a sonnet commencing,

 
"Have pity on my loneliness, my own!"
 

"Finished Herald letter. Mr. F.W.H. Myers called. Lunched at Walter Pater's and met M. Gabriel Sarrazin, the French critic, who told me that Guy de Maupassant thought the three disgraces for a French author were to be décoré, to belong to the Academy, and to write for the Revue des Deux Mondes."

"Jan. 1, 1889. Wrote poem, 'At Dawn,' or whatever better title I can think of. Spent the time from 8 to 2 in correcting my 13,000 words story."

"Louise Guiney came in to help me look over my poems. We worked till night, then went to the Cecilia concert to hear Maida Lang's quartet."

"Such a busy morning! Polished off a rondel to send to the Independent. Read Herald proof; wrote letters. This afternoon pleasant guests,—Mrs. Ole Bull, Mr. Clifford, Percival Lowell, and others."

[In New York.] "Went over to Brooklyn and gave a Browning reading.... Met the Russian Princess Engalitcheff. Lunched at Mrs. Field's with the Princess and Mr. and Mrs. Locke Richardson. Went in the evening to the Gilders'."

"Wrote a little.... Mrs. [John T.] Sargent and sweet Nellie Hutchinson called in the forenoon; and in the afternoon ten people, including Stedman."

[In London.] "Worked on poems in forenoon. Had a lovely basket of flowers from dear old Mr. Greenough. Gave a little dinner at night at the Grand Hotel, to the Oswald Crawfurds, Sir Bruce Seton, Mrs. Trubner, and Mr. Greenough."

Extracts of this sort might be multiplied, and they explain why it was that amid so much apparent preoccupation with social affairs Mrs. Moulton kept steadily her place as a literary worker. Her genuine and abiding love for letters was the secret of her ability thus to enter with zest into the pleasures of life without losing her power of artistic production.

Among the records of the year 1889 is this touching entry, with the date April 27, at the close of a visit to her mother:

"Poor mother's last words to me were: 'I love you better than anything in this world. You are my first and last thought. Believe it, for it is the truth.'"

In London this summer Mrs. Moulton was considering a title for a new volume of poems, and had asked advice of William Winter. He chanced to be in England at the time, and wrote at once:

Mr. Winter to Mrs. Moulton

No. 13 Upper Phillimore Place,

High Street, Kensington,

August 14, 1889.

Dear Louise: Your letter has just come. Business affairs brought me suddenly to town. I will seek to see you as soon as they can be disposed of, Saturday or Sunday, perhaps. But I deeply regret your not coming to the "Red Horse." He might have led us a glorious fairy race. The only one of your titles that hits my fancy is "Vagrant Moods," and that is not good enough. Fancy titles are dangerous things. They generally have been used before. I once made use of the word "Thistledown," as a title for a collection of my poems, and too late found it had been used by an American lady, Miss Boyle, for a similar purpose. And Miss Boyle, or her attorneys, threatened me with the terrors of the law for infringement of copyright. I was also told that Miss Boyle's book had recently passed through my hands; and this was true, though I had not the least recollection of the book or its title. In fact, I had never read a line of it, but only at the request of a friend of hers turned it over to Bayard Taylor for review. He wrote a notice of it in The Tribune. And here, only lately, I learn from an Australian paper that my title of "Shakespeare's England," used by me to indicate the England of poetry, was used twenty-five years ago by a writer about the active England of Shakespeare's time. "Poems, by L.C.M." would be safer than any fancy title. "Awfully hackneyed," I hear. Well, if you have a fancy title, why not cull out a Shakespearian phrase? "The Primrose Path," say? Think a little about this. I will think further. Only look up clear, and so God bless you and good night.—What a lonely place this with no one to speak to and no one to hear.

Always,

Your old friend,

William Winter.

The solution of Mrs. Moulton's difficulty was found in the attractive title, "In the Garden of Dreams." The volume appeared in the following year.

Among the special friendships of Mrs. Moulton's life of both literary and personal interest, one of the most important and enjoyable to her was that with Professor Arlo Bates, the poet and romancist, whose work she appreciated highly and whose sympathetic companionship gave her great pleasure. With him she felt a peculiar sympathy, and to him she wrote a series of letters, extending over many years, beginning in the decade of the eighties. The extracts presented from these are here grouped, as, while they thus lose a strict chronological thread, they gain in a more complete representation, and their nature is such that the precise date (rarely given, indeed, as they were mostly dated by a month only) is, in any case, negligible in importance.

The extracts chosen deal almost exclusively with literary matters. The only son of Professor Bates, in his twentieth year, afterward the author of "A Madcap Cruise," whom Mrs. Moulton playfully called "Prince Oric," and to whom in his sixth year she wrote a delicious sonnet under that title, is alluded to, as well as is his mother, who wrote over the pen-name Eleanor Putnam.

Mrs. Moulton to Arlo Bates

"… Thanks for the charming book. My love to the sweetest wife I know. Thank her for her letter...."

"… Your letter about Marston's songs came to me when he and William Sharp happened to be passing the evening with me. I read it aloud, to Mr. Marston's great delight. It quite went to his heart.... I am so sorry I shall not find you and Mrs. Bates where you were last year. That desperate flirtation with Master Oric is off entirely...."

"… I have just been reading 'Childe Roland,' and it baffles me, as it has so often done before. I feel less sure that I understand it than any other of Browning's poems. Is the Black Tower Death, do you think? But what a wonderful poem it is! I suppose spiritual judgments concern themselves with spiritual states...."

"… I am delighted with what you say of Mr. Marston's poem in Harper's, because I think the poem too subtle and delicate to be appreciated, save by the very elect; and I am also delighted because what you said gave him so much pleasure. Marston said of you, 'What a wonderful psychological vein, almost as powerful as that of Browning, runs through many of the poems of Mr. Bates.'…"

"… I am so eager to see your novel of artistic Boston. 'The Pagans,'—a capital title. I am glad you have had the courage to tell the truth in it as you see it. I don't see it quite as you do, I fancy, but I am thankful when any one has the courage of his opinions, for it seems to me that the English and American writers are just now very much like cats standing on the edge of a stream, and afraid to put in their feet. They say what they think is expected of them to say, and they reserve the truth for the seasons when they enter their closets and shut the door on all the world. I think there is more hypocrisy in novels than in religion."

"… I am ashamed that two weeks have gone by since I received your noble book, 'Told in the Gate.' I have not been so neglectful of it as it seems. I have not only taken my own pleasure in it, but I have shown it to other poets who are interested in knowing what is being done in America. It is a beautiful book externally—how beautiful it is internally I am sure the world of readers will eagerly perceive; but never one of them can love it more than I do. Even in print it is hard for me to say which poem I prefer. There is not one among them that is not well done from the point of art, and thrillingly interesting as a story. The lyrics star the book like gems. They sing themselves over and over to my listening mind.... I feel a glow of exultant pride that the author is my friend. I am proud and glad to have my name inscribed in a volume I so admire and love. I am enjoying London as I always do.... I go toward the end of August to pay some visits in Scotland, and then to visit Lady Ashburton in Hampshire and after that to Paris. I enclose some foreign stamps for the young Prince.... Your poems are among the pleasures of my life."

Of the sonnets of Mr. Bates Mrs. Moulton wrote:

"… Dante breathed through the sonnet the high aspirations of that love which shaped and determined his soul's life. By sonnets it was that Petrarch wedded immortally his name to that of his ever-wooed, never-won Laura of Avignon. Strong Michael Angelo wrote sonnets for that noble lady, Vittoria Colonna, whose hand he kissed only after Death had kissed the soul from her pure lips.

"The one personal intimacy with Shakespeare to which any of his worshippers have been admitted is such as comes from loving study of his sonnets, in 'sessions of sweet, silent thought.' The sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning burned with the pure flame of her perfect love. In the sonnets of 'The House of Life' Rossetti commemorated that love and loss so passionate and so abiding that it seemed to him the whole of life. In the sonnets of 'Song-Tide' Marston sang the praises of his early love, as in those of 'All In All' he bewailed her loss; and his sonnets of later years throb like a tell-tale heart with the profoundest melancholy out of whose depths a human soul ever cried for pity.

"Such and thus intimate have been the revelations made through this form of verse—so rigid, yet so plastic and so human.

"To the list of these sonneteers who have thus sounded the deepest depths of love and sorrow, the name of Arlo Bates has now been added, by the publication of his noble and sincere 'Sonnets in Shadow.' Born of one man's undying pain, these sonnets at once become, through the subtlety of their research into the innermost depths of human emotion, the property and the true expression of all souls who have loved and suffered.

"A few of us know, personally, the rare charm, the exquisite loveliness, of her thus royally honored and passionately lamented; and all of us who read can feel that thus and thus our own hearts might be wrung by such a loss—that in us, also, if we have souls at all, such sorrow might bear fruit in kindred emotion, even though for want of words our lips be dumb. It seems to me that it is the dumb souls—who feel all that the poet has sung, and yet cannot break the silence with a cry—who owe the deepest debt to this, their interpreter."

Mrs. Moulton to Mr. Bates

"October 27, 1889.

"I have been passing this rainy afternoon with your sonnets. I had read some of them more than once before, but this afternoon I have been quite alone save for their good company. I have read the strong, noble sequence through, from first to last, enjoying them more than ever. I like every one of them, but I had a pencil and paper by me and put down the numbers that most moved me. I see that my list is not short; do you care to see what it includes? It begins with the beautiful sonnet of dedication; then the first, with its wonderful procession of the gray days passing the torpid soul, and laying their 'curious fingers, chill and numb,' upon its wounds. Then the sixth, with the

 
"… drowned sailors, lying lank and chill
Under the sirupy green wave.
 

And the fifteenth with its visions of love.

 
"Never can joy surmise how long are sorrow's hours,
 

ought to be, like certain lines of Wordsworth, among the immortal quotations. I think your sonnets noble alike in thought and in execution. They can have no more faithful lover than I am; and I do believe that if there is anything in which my opinion has any value, it is on the form of poetry. I love it so sincerely and I have studied it so devotedly....

"… Mrs. Spofford has been to stay over Sunday with me and I read through to her your new volume of poems, with the exception of 'The Lilies of Mummel See,' which she read to me. I think you would be pleased; could you know how much we both enjoyed and admired the book. To my mind, 'Under the Beech Tree' is the finest romantic drama of the time. I like it far better than I do 'Colombe's Birthday,' much as I like that. Mrs. Spofford is quite wild with enthusiasm about 'The Gift.' She said the last line,

 
"His heart is still mine, beating warm in my grave,
 

is not only the finest line in your book, but the finest line that has been written by any one in a score of years."

"… Your suggestion as to national characteristics of women struck me as a curious coincidence with the fact that the editor of the Fortnightly has just asked me to write an article on American and English women, contrasting and comparing them, and discussing their differences. But the differences; seem to me individual, not national.

"Thanks for your suggestion about the sonnet.

 
"Break through the shining, splendid ranks
 

seems to me simpler and more forcible, but then this involves the 'I pray,' to which you greatly object.

 
"Break through their splendid militant array:
 

"I'll copy both, and see what you think. On the whole, I like yours better.

"I have been arranging books all the afternoon, and I am so tired that I wish I had the young prince here, or such another,—only there is no other."

The same to the same

"Dear Pagan: I am on page 238 of 'The Puritans,' and I pause to say how piteously cruel is your portrait of –. Sargent, at his best, was never so relentlessly realistic. I pity Fenton so desperately I can hardly bear it. Why do I sympathize so with him when he is so little worthy? Is it your fault, or mine? I believe I am not pitiless enough to write novels, even if I had every other qualification.

"Your character of Fenton is admirably studied. It is worthy of the author of 'The Pagans' and 'A Wheel of Fire.'"

"… I have finished reading 'The Puritans,'—all the duties of life neglected till I came to the end. I have not been so interested in a book for ages. I am especially interested in the conflict of the souls between degrees of agnosticism. It is the keenest longing of my life to know what is truth."

"I have reason to be grateful for your birthday, since I find you one of the most interesting persons I have ever had the happiness to know."

"I have just finished reading 'The Diary of a Saint,' and I cannot wait an hour to tell you how very greatly I admire it. It has been said that all the stories were told. You prove how untrue is this statement,—for your story, or anything like it, has never been told before. It is absolutely unique and original.... I am so interested in every page of the book that I have an impatient desire to know all the spiritual experiences that lead to it."

"Just now at Les Voirons (Haute Savoie) I have found a sort of hilltop paradise. Four thousand and more feet above the sea level, the air is like balm, and the views indescribably lovely. I have never seen Mont Blanc half so well. It is far more wonderful than the view from Chamounix. And just now at night the white ghost of a young moon hangs above it, in a pale, clear sky, and the lesser peaks all around shimmer in the moonlight. This hotel is ten climbing miles from any railroad station. You can buy nothing here but postage stamps."

In a characteristic letter from Rome, Richard Greenough, the sculptor, says: