Full of kindly regrets came Monsieur and Madame Mallarmé to pay me a parting call. 'We have wishéd,' began the poet, mustering his best English in compliment to the occasion, 'Madame and I have wishéd to make to Madame Moulton a souvenir for the good-bye, and we have thought much, we have consideréd the preference beautiful of Madame, so refinéd; and we do reflect that as Madame is pleaséd to so graciously the dolls of Paris like, we have wishéd to a doll present her. Will Madame do us the pleasure great to come out and choose with us a doll, _très jolie_, that may have the pleasure to please her?'" It would be a pleasure to record that Mrs. Moulton accepted the gift. The doll presented by the leader of the Symbolists would have been not only historic, but it might have been regarded as signifying in the language of symbolism things unutterable; but she could only say: "Oh, no; please. I should be laughed at. Please let it be something else." And the guests retired pensive, to return next day with a handsome Japanese cabinet as their offering. "And I have pined ever since," Mrs. Moulton added smilingly, when she told the story, "for the Mallarmé doll that might have been mine." In 1877 the Macmillans brought out Mrs. Moulton's first volume of poems under the title "Swallow Flights," the name being taken from Tennyson's well known lines: Short swallow-flights of song, that dip Their wings in tears, and skim away. The American edition, which followed soon after from the house of Roberts Brothers, was entitled simply "Poems." The success of the book was a surprise to the author. Professor William Minto wrote in the _Examiner_: "We do not, indeed, know where to find, among the works of English poetesses, the same self-controlled fulness of expression with the same depth and tenderness of simple feeling.... 'One Dread' might have been penned by Sir Philip Sidney." The _Athenæum_, always chary of overpraise, declared: "It is not too much to say of these poems that they exhibit delicate and rare beauty, marked originality, and perfection of style. What is still better, they impress us with a sense of subtle and vivid imagination, and that spontaneous feeling which is the essence of lyrical poetry.... A poem called 'The House of Death' is a fine example of the writer's best style. It paints briefly, but with ghostly fidelity, the doomed house, which stands blind and voiceless amid the light and laughter of summer. The lines which we print in italics show a depth of suggestion and a power of epithet which it would be difficult to surpass. "THE HOUSE OF DEATH "Not a hand has lifted the latchet, Since she went out of the door,-- No footsteps shall cross the threshold, Since she can come in no more.