Just before her sailing in 1880 came this note from Mr. Longfellow: _Mr. Longfellow to Mrs. Moulton_ CRAIGIE HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, March 2, 1880. DEAR MRS. MOULTON: ... Yes, surely I will give you a letter to Lowell. I will bring it to you as soon as I am able to leave the house.... It was a great pleasure to meet you at Mrs. Ole Bull's, but I want to hear more about your visits to England, and whom you saw, and what you did. What is it? Is it the greater freedom one feels in a foreign country where no _Evening Transcript_ takes note of one's outgoings and incomings? I can't attempt to explain it. Please don't get expatriated. Ah, no, life is not all cathedrals and ruined castles, and other theatrical properties of the Old World. It is not all scenery, and within the four walls of home life is much the same everywhere. Truly yours, HENRY W. LONGFELLOW. Of cathedrals and ruins she saw much, but people always interested her more than any inanimate things. She records her talks with one and another of the intellectual friends whom she met now in one city and now in another. She records, for instance, a talk with Miss Anne Hampton Brewster, so long the Roman correspondent of the _Boston Advertiser_, the topic being the poetry of Swinburne. "She regarded his 'Laus Veneris' as the most fearful testimony against evil she ever read," Mrs. Moulton wrote; "and in 'Hesperia,' that glorious, beautiful, poetic cry, she declared could be found the way to the poet's meaning." She visited the Roman studios, and in that of Mr. Story saw the busts of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, and others, and the statue of "Medea," just then completed. She wrote later that the concluding ten lines of Swinburne's "Anactoria" "express the character of Story's 'Sappho.' It is as if the poem had been written for the statue, or the statue was modelled to interpret the poem." One result of her travels was the publication in 1881 of a charming little collection of papers called "Random Rambles." The book contained short chapters about Rome and Paris and Genoa and Florence and Venice and Edinburgh and the London parks. A reviewer characterized the volume aptly when he said: "Mrs. Moulton seems to have gathered up the poetic threads of European life which were too fine for other visitors to see or get, to have caught and given expression to the impalpable aromas of the various places she visited, so that the reader feels a certain atmospheric charm it is impossible to describe." The little book was deservedly successful. Mrs. Moulton's writings seemed always to conform to the standard set by Mr. Aldrich, who once said to her: "Literature ought to warm the heart; not chill it." Her readers were conscious without fail of a current of sympathetic humanity.