Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend — John Shaqi
Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and FriendWhiting, Lilian
General
Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend
Whiting, Lilian
Moulton, Louise Chandler, 1835-1908
lend to the rhyme of the poet
The music of thy voice;
the lines seeming almost to have been written to describe her recital
of poetry.
The fairies who came to the christening of this golden-haired and
golden-voiced child seemed, indeed, to have given her all good gifts
in full measure. She was endowed with beauty and with genius; she was
born into surroundings of liberal comfort and of refinement; into
prosperity which made possible the gratification of all reasonable
desires and aspirations of a gifted girl. It was her fortune through
life to be sheltered from material anxieties. To a nature less
sensitively perceptive of the needs and sorrows of others, to one less
generous and tender, the indulgence which fell to her as an only and
idolized child, might have fostered that indifference to the condition
of those less favored which deprives its possessor of the richest
experiences of life. With her to see need or misfortune was to feel
the instant impulse to relieve or at least to alleviate the suffering.
Colonel Higginson, in recalling her life in England said:
"I shall never forget, in particular, with what tears in his
eyes the living representative of Philip Bourke Marston
spoke to me in London of her generous self-devotion to his
son, the blind poet, of whom she became the editor and
biographer."
Emerson has declared that comforts and advantages are good if one does
not use them as a cushion on which to go to sleep. With Mrs. Moulton
her native gifts seemed to generate aspiration and effort for noble
achievement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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