By some untraced or unanalyzed impulse Mrs. Moulton was apt to be moved on each New Year's day to write a poem. Usually this was a sonnet, but now and then a lyric instead; and for many years the first entry in the fresh volume of her diary records the fact. On the first of January, 1890, she writes: "Began the New Year by writing a sonnet, to be called 'How Shall We Know,' unless I can find a better title." "The Last Good-bye" was the title upon which she afterward fixed. On the fifth day of January of this year died Dr. Westland Marston. Mrs. Moulton wrote in her _Herald_ letters a review of his life and work, in the course of which she said with touching earnestness: "I scarcely know a life which has been so tragic as his in the way of successive bereavements; and when I think of him as I saw him last, on the first day of last November--in his solitary library, with the pictures of those he had loved and lost on its walls, and with only their ghosts for his daily company--I almost feel that, for his own sake, I ought to be glad that he has gone to join the beloved ones whom one can easily fancy making festival of welcome for him." Her intimacy had been close with all the family, and while Edmund Gosse was right when he wrote to her that she seemed to him always to have been "Philip's true guardian-ray, or better genius," her friendship for Cecily Marston, for Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, and with Dr. Marston himself was hardly less close. The tragic ending of the family could not but cast a bleak shade over the opening year. Her relations with English writers and the good offices by which she helped to make their work better known on this side of the Atlantic might be illustrated by numerous letters. _Richard Garnett to Mrs. Moulton_ BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON, August 4, 1890. DEAR MRS. MOULTON: I hope I need not say how your letter has gratified me. The progress of "The Twilight of the Gods" has been slow, and I was especially disappointed that the endeavor to introduce it to the American public through an American publisher fell through. But there seems token of its gradually making way, and I value your approbation among the most signal. I shall be delighted to receive the copy of your poems, which I know I can safely promise to admire. Believe me, Most sincerely yours, R. GARNETT. Both Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Meredith had, each unknown to the other, suggested to Mrs. Moulton that she write a novel in verse. "Lucile" and "Aurora Leigh" had each in its time and way made a wide popular success, and they felt that Mrs. Moulton might succeed equally. To this suggestion Mr. Meredith alludes in a letter in which he thanks Mrs. Moulton for a copy of "In the Garden of Dreams." _George Meredith to Mrs. Moulton_ MARCH 9, 1890.