"The love of life, the love of children, the love of kin--these constrain all of us; but it was another kind of love that constrained Margaret Grant. Curiously enough the first awakening came to her soul from a book written by an unbeliever, a book meant to bring Christianity to the final test of final obedience, and to prove its absurdity, thereby prove that to be a Christian as Christ taught, would overthrow the uses of the world, and uproot the whole system of things. 'Let the uses of the world go, and the system of things take care of itself,' Margaret Grant said when she laid the book down. 'This same religion of Christ is the best thing I know, and I will go where it leads me.' And then she waited for the true Guide, that Holy Spirit which shall be given to every honest soul that seeks--waited for her special work, but not idly, since every day and all the days were the little offices of love that make life sweeter for whatever fellow-pilgrim comes in our way. "Margaret read to her half-blind grandmother--taught the small boy that ran the family errands to read--helped her mother with the housekeeping, all on the lines of 'godly George Herbert,' who wrote: Who sweeps a room as for God's laws, Makes that and the action fine. But all the time she felt that these were not the real work of her life, that work which was on its way." With the earnestness of spirit which is shown in this and which so continually sounded in her poems, Mrs. Moulton lived her rich life in the congenial atmosphere which surrounded her. Mrs. Spofford, writing of Mrs. Moulton from personal memory, says of her in 1860: "She was now in her twenty-fifth year, fully launched upon the literary high-seas, contributing to _Harper's_, the _Galaxy_, and _Scribner's_ as they came into existence, and to the _Young Folks_, the _Youth's Companion_, and other periodicals for children. Her life seemed a fortunate one. She had a charming home in Boston where she met and entertained the most pleasant people; her housekeeping duties were fulfilled to a nicety, and no domestic detail neglected for all her industrious literary undertakings. A daughter had been born to her, Florence, to whom 'Bed-time Stories' were dedicated in some most tender and touching verses, and, somewhat later, a son whose little life was only numbered by days." Life was deepening and offering ever wider horizons. With Emily Dickinson she might have said of the complex interweaving of event, influence, and inspiration: Ah! the bewildering thread! The tapestries of Paradise So notelessly are made. CHAPTER III 1860-1876