"No words could overpraise the sweet graciousness of Longfellow and Dr. Holmes to me, a new-comer into their world. I knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, also. The very last time I saw him he had just returned from California, and he crossed the Athenæum Library, where we chanced to be, to ask me if I had ever been there myself and had seen the big trees. 'Why,' he said, 'it took thirteen horses to go round one tree, the head of one touching the tail of another--what do you think of that?' "I remember once, when I was a guest in his house in Concord, his telling me that he had long wanted to make an anthology of the one-poem men. And he went on to speak of the poets who were remembered by only one poem. He never carried out his idea, but I wish some one else might." It was a rich and stimulating atmosphere into which Mrs. Moulton entered in Boston. The first winter after her marriage Thackeray visited this country and gave in Boston, in January of that year (1856), his lectures on "The Four Georges." In recalling these, Mrs. Moulton afterward said: "I sat close to the platform, thoroughly entranced, and longing to speak to him--this great man! longing with all a romantic schoolgirl's ardor and capacity for hero-worship. I never missed a lecture. The last day and the last lecture came, and as Mr. Thackeray came from the platform he bent toward me and said: 'I shall miss the kind, encouraging face that has sat beneath me for so many hours'; and I was too surprised to be able to answer him a word. But it is a memory that has never left me." Boston in the fifties had little to boast of in the artistic line. Henry James, writing of Hawthorne's time, noted with amusement the devotion to the "attenuated outlines" of Flaxman's drawings. The classic old Athenæum contained practically all that the city could offer in the way of art. Here were some casts from antique marbles, specimens of the work of Greenough and Thorwaldsen, a certain number of dull busts of interesting men, a supply of engravings, and a small collection of paintings. The paintings were largely copies, but included originals by Allston, Copley, and a few others. In music the taste was pure, if the opportunities were but provincial. Grisi and Mario in brief visits delighted the town in opera; the Handel and Haydn Society provided oratorio; the Harvard Orchestra gave instrumental concerts. In the spring of 1856 was held a Beethoven Festival, and the bronze statue, so long familiar in the old Boston Music Hall, was inaugurated with a poem by the sculptor, William Wetmore Story.