LITMIR.BIZ

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also an engraving of Elmwood Cottage. The letter-press opened with an "Invocation to the Spirit of Poetry" by the youthful editor, and besides sketches and verses of her own the volume offered contributions by Mrs. Sigourney, Virginia F. Townsend, George S. Burleigh, Amanda M. Douglas, and others.

      With this publication Miss Chandler may be said to have come fully and formally into full-fledged authorship. She was deeply tinged with the sentimental fashions which reigned universally in America in the middle of the nineteenth century, and which had, indeed, by no means disappeared in England; but she had genuine feeling, a natural instinct for literary form, an ear unusually sensitive to metrical effect, and her real power had already shown itself unmistakably. From this time on her progress in her art was sure and constant.

      One influence of her youthful environment may be mentioned here since it has been often commented upon. The strain of melancholy habitual in Mrs. Moulton's poetry has been ascribed to the shadow which was cast upon her childhood by the sternness of the Calvinistic faith. An English critic has written:

      "She was brought up in abysmal Puritan Calvinism, and her slumber at night was disturbed by terrific visions of a future of endless torment. The doctrine of election pressed heavily on her youthful soul.... The whole upbringing of children in Puritan circles in those days was strict and stern to a degree impossible to be realized in a day when vulgar sentimentalism rules supreme, and when it is considered cruel and harsh to flog a rebellious boy. The way in which children were brought up by the Puritans of New England in Mrs. Moulton's day may have had its faults, but it turned out a class of person whom it is hopeless to expect the present day methods of education will ever be able to produce."

      In this are both truth and exaggeration. The parents of Mrs. Moulton were, it is true, Calvinists, but they were neither bigots nor fanatics. The question was quite as much that of the sensitive, delicately responsive temperament of the child as of the doctrine in which she was reared. Being what she was, she realized to the full the possible horrors involved in the theology of the time, and imaginatively suffered intensely. She once said to a London interviewer:

      "I remember that the Calvinistic doctrines I was taught filled my imagination with an awful foreboding of doom and despair. I can recall waking in the depth of the night, cold with horror, and saying to myself, 'Why, if I'm not among the elect, I can't be saved, no matter how hard I try,' and stealing along on my little bare feet to my mother's bed, praying to be taken in, with a vague sense that if I must be lost in the far future, at least now I must go where love could comfort me, and human arms shelter me from the shapeless terrors that mocked my solitude."

      While, however, the lack of a more encouraging interpretation of Divine Goodness undoubtedly was to a degree responsible for the minor chords which became habitual in her verse, the natural longing which is part of the poetic nature, was in Mrs. Moulton unusually strong and was exaggerated by the literary modes of her day. On the whole the influences of her childhood were sweet and sound and wholesome. Her natural love of beauty was fed and developed, her inherent literary taste was nourished by sympathy and by success, and her wonderful sensitiveness to literary form trained by early and constant practice. It is even possible that the very harshness of Calvinism, which was almost the only shadow, was a healthful influence which deepened and strengthened her art, that might without this have suffered from sunshine too uninterrupted.

      CHAPTER II

      1853-1860

      A beautiful and happy girl

      With step as light as summer air.—Whittier.

      Her glorious fancies come from far

      Beneath the silver evening-star,

      And yet her heart is ever near.—Lowell.

      At dawn of Love, at dawn of Life.—L.C.M.

      IN a lyric written by Mrs. Moulton in after years, occurs the lovely line quoted above, which seems vividly to describe her as she stood, a girl of eighteen, on the threshold of a new phase of life.

      Young as she was Miss Chandler had already, by her newspaper and magazine work, made for herself a reputation, and she now collected the papers which made up the volume spoken of in the previous chapter, "This, That, and the Other," with the encouraging result of a sale of twenty thousand copies. The North American Review was then almost the only magazine in the country exclusively devoted to criticism and the intellectual life. Much of the best literary work of the time, in the way of fiction and poetry, appeared in such periodicals as Godey's Lady's Book, Peterson's Magazine, and the like; and to these Miss Chandler was a constant contributor. The weekly newspapers were rich in poems by Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, the Cary sisters, N.P. Willis, Poe, and many others of permanent fame. Besides these, a host of the transient singers of the day, literary meteors, flitted across the firmament, not unfrequently with some song or story which individually was quite as worthy of recognition as were those of their contemporaries whose power to sustain themselves in longer flights and to make good the early promise has earned their title to permanent recognition. Mrs. Moulton's scrapbooks indicate how rich were the literary columns of the newspapers in those days. There being then no international copyright law, the American editor enriched his page with the latest poem of Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, or Mrs. Browning. Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Dr. Parsons, Nora Perry, William Winter, the Stoddards (Richard Henry and Elizabeth), N.P. Willis, Saxe, Mrs. Stowe, Jean Ingelow, Miss Mulock, Aldrich, and Mary Clemmer, are largely represented in these old scrapbooks. Many fugitive poems, too, appear, as the "Bertha" of Anne Whitney, a poem well entitled to literary immortality; the "Three Kisses of Farewell," by Saxe Holm; the "Unseen Spirits," by Willis, a poem too little known; and Mr. Aldrich's "The Unforgiven," excluded from his later editions, but which contains those beautiful lines:

      In the East the rose of morning biddeth fair to blossom soon,

      But it never, never blossoms in this picture; and the moon

      Never ceases to be crescent, and the June is always June.

      Miss Chandler's book was one of over four hundred pages, illustrated by the famous Rouse (whose portrait of Emerson has always been so highly considered), and its fine engravings and its binding of crimson cloth combined to give it a sumptuous appearance. The Springfield Republican gave it pleasant recognition in these words:

      "The writings of a young girl still on the threshold of life and still to be regarded as a bright, incarnate promise,—her writings are very graceful, very tender, and very beautiful, just what the flowers of life's spring should be."

      The young author dedicated her book to her mother in tender phrase, and her artless "Preface" was one to disarm any adverse view.

      In after years Mrs. Moulton smilingly replied to some questions regarding her initiation into authorship:

      "I remember the huge posters with which they placarded the walls, headed, 'Read this book and see what a girl of eighteen can do.' I think I had the grace to be a little shocked at these posters, but the reviews were so kind, and said such lovely things that—Ah! shall I ever be so happy again as when I read them!"

      Edmund Clarence Stedman, who had just left Yale College and who, at the beginning of his literary career, was editing a country paper in Connecticut, greeted Miss Chandler's book with the ardent praise of youth and friendship; but these warm phrases of approval were also the almost unanimous expression of all the reviewers of the day. The twentieth century reader may smile at Mr. Stedman's youthful distrust of the "strong-minded woman," but his remarks are interesting. Of "This, That, and the Other," he wrote:

      "'This, That, and the Other,' is a collection of prose sketches and verse from the pen of a young lady fast rising into a literary reputation; a reputation which, though it is achieved in no 'Uncle Tom' or 'Fanny Fern' mode, is no less sure than that of Mrs. Stowe, or Sara Payson Willis, and will be more substantial, in that the works on which it is founded are more classic and in better taste.... Miss Chandler is a native of Pomfret in this state, and every denizen of Connecticut should be proud of her talents. She is beautiful and interesting; her manners are in marked distinction from the forwardness of the strong-minded woman of

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