Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and FriendWhiting, Lilian
General
Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend
Whiting, Lilian
Moulton, Louise Chandler, 1835-1908
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:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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