Mrs. Moulton's next volume was a collection of the stories which she had contributed to various magazines. It was entitled "My Third Book," and was brought out by the Harpers in 1859. It was greeted as a work which "bears the seal of feminine grace," and which "reveals the beauty of Mrs. Moulton's genius." Of two of the tales a reviewer said, in terms which give with amusing fidelity the tone of the favorable book-notice of the mid-century: "'No. 101' reminds us of some wondrous statue, her pen has so sculptured the whole story. 'Four Letters from Helen Hamilton' are enough to stir all hearts with their [_sic_] high purpose and the beautiful ideal of womanhood which consecrate [_sic_] them." Continuing her old habit at school, Mrs. Moulton for many years kept notes of her abundant reading, and the comments and extracts set down in her exquisite handwriting throw a most interesting light on the growth of her thought. She mentions Miss Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" as "interesting, but deficient in earnestness." "Guy Livingston," that old-fashioned apotheosis of brute force, she, like most of the novel-readers of the time, found "fascinating." "The Scarlet Letter" impresses her profoundly, and she copies many passages; the first volume of "Modern Painters" she reads with the most serious earnestness, and comments at length upon Ruskin's view that public opinion has no claim to be taken as a standard in the judgment of works of art. Although the bride of a few months, and not yet twenty-one, she enters with the enthusiasm of a schoolgirl into the larger opportunities of life opened to her by her marriage. To English literature she gives herself in serious study. She writes copious analyses of the history of different periods, and critical studies of various writers. It was perhaps at this period that she began to respond to the work of the Elizabethan lyricists with a sympathy which marked the kinship which English critics found so evident in her poetic maturity. The list of books noted in these records during the next ten years is large and varied. Mrs. Gaskell, Bishop Butler, Dr. Martineau, Miss Mulock (Mrs. Craik), Anthony Trollope, and later George Eliot and George Meredith, are among the writers whom she mentions; and from the "Self-Help" of Samuel Smiles in 1860 she makes copious extracts. Her taste was catholic, and her attitude toward literature always one of genuine seriousness. Mrs. Moulton's memoranda for her own stories are both interesting and suggestive. To see as it were the mind of the creative writer at work is always fascinating, and here, as in the "American Notebooks" of Hawthorne, the reader seems to be assisting in the very laboratory of the imagination. Some of these notes are as follows: