Among the pleasant friendships which came into a life whose entire texture seemed woven of friendship and song, was that with Coulson Kernahan, who, though one of the younger men of letters in England, had already made a recognized place. His warmly responsive nature made the two especially sympathetic, and they were alike in their devotion to literature. After the vanishing of the "Marston group," Mrs. Moulton's most intimate London circle came to comprise Sir Bruce and Lady Seton, with whom she stayed frequently at Durham House, Mr. Kernahan, Mrs. Campbell-Praed, and Herbert E. Clarke. Mr. Kernahan's acquaintance with Mrs. Moulton began from a critique on "Swallow Flights" which he had written for the _Fortnightly_. In it he had said: "No one who looks upon life with earnest eyes can fail to be touched by the passionate human cry which rings from Mrs. Moulton's poems. No one whose ear is attuned to catch the wail that is to be heard in the maddest, merriest music of the violin, to whom the sound of wind and sea at midnight is like that of innumerable lamentations; no one who, in the movement of a multitude of human beings--be they marching to the bounding music of fife and drum, or hurrying to witness a meeting of the starving unemployed--no one who in all these hears something of 'the still, sad music of humanity,' can read her verses unstirred." Mr. Kernahan had also emphasized--Mrs. Moulton herself thought somewhat unduly--the strain of sadness in her poems; and had he known her personally at the time he wrote, he would surely not have called her "world-weary and melancholy." The point was one often made by critics, and has been alluded to in an earlier chapter. Partly the melancholy note was due to environment, but more to temperament. Mrs. Moulton almost at the beginning had edited a "gift-book" and the fact is significant of the literary fashions of her youth. The "annuals" and "gift-books" of the second quarter of the nineteenth century were redolent of a sort of pressed-rose sadness, a sort of faded-out reminiscence of belated Byronism; a richly passionate gloom of spirit was held to be necessary to lyric inspiration. By this convention Mrs. Moulton was undoubtedly affected, although by no means to such an extent as was Edgar Allan Poe. With her the cause of the minor cadence was chiefly a temperament which gave a sad quality to her singing as nature has put a plaintive timbre into the notes of certain birds. In writing to Mr. Kernahan about his article, she said: "I always hear the minor chords in nature's music; after the summer, the autumn; after youth, age; after life, death. I happened yesterday to close a poem: "O June, dear month of sunshine and of flowers, The affluent year will hold you not again; Once, only once, can youth and love be ours, And after that the autumn and the rain. Is it not true?" Yet she assured him that she was "often gay."