It is in Boston that she did the greater part of her work, including her books of travel, Random Rambles and Lazy Tours, published her four volumes of poetry, and edited and prefaced biographies, A Last Harvest and Garden Secrets, and the Collected Poems of Philip Bourke Marston, as well as a selection from Arthur O'Shaughnessy's verses.

Indeed, before she was eight years old, her active mind was creating a world of its own in a little unwritten play, which it pleased her fancy to call a Spanish drama, and with which she spent all summer, filling it with personages.

The rigid Calvinism of the family had undoubtedly a very stimulating effect on the emotions of the sensitive child, and to its far-reaching influence may be ascribed the tinge of melancholy found in many of her pages.

[3] Directly after the publication of this first book, Moulton went for a final school-year to Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary in August 1854, finishing in 1855.

[1] Six weeks after leaving the Troy Female Seminary,[1] on August 27, 1855,[2] she married a Boston publisher, William Upham Moulton (d. 1898), under whose auspices her earliest literary work had appeared in The True Flag.

Pausing in London long enough to see Queen Victoria open Parliament in person for the first time after the Prince Consort's death, she hastened through Paris on her way to Rome to view old palaces, gardens, and galleries, touched to tears by Pope Pius IX's benediction, enjoying the hospitality of the studios of Elihu Vedder, John Rollin Tilton, and others, and of the gracious and charming social life of Rome.

The Academy spoke warmly of their felicity of epithet, their healthiness, their suggestiveness, their imaginative force pervaded by the depth and sweetness of perfect womanhood.

The Tattler pronounced her a mistress of form and of artistic perfection, saying also that England had no poet in such full sympathy with woods and winds and waves, finding in her the one truly natural singer in an age of aesthetic imitation.

The Times, The Morning Post, the Literary World, all welcomed the book with equally warm praise, and The Pall Mall Gazette spoke of her lyrical feeling as like that which gave a unique charm to Heinrich Heine's songs.

Among the innumerable letters which she received, filled with admiring warmth, were some from Matthew Arnold, Henry Austin Dobson, Frederick Locker, and William Bell Scott.

[1] Her songs were set to music by Francesco Berger and Lady Charlesmont, and later on by Margaret Ruthven Lang, Arthur Foote, Ethelbert Nevin, and many others.

The first verse is eminently characteristic of you, exhibiting in a very marked degree what runs through nearly all of your poems, the most exquisite and subtle blending of strong emotion with the sense of external nature.

It seems to me this perfect poem is possessed by the melancholy yet tender music of winds sighing at twilight, in some churchyard, through old trees that watch beside silent graves.

He has said with authority that she deserved to be classed with the best Elizabethan lyricists in her lyrics,—with Robert Herrick and Thomas Campion and Shakespeare,—while in her sonnets she might rightly take a place with John Milton and William Wordsworth and Christina Rossetti.

This was in relation to her first volume, "Swallow Flights"; and in conclusion he said: "This poet must look for her brothers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among the noble and intense lyrists.

In "At the Wind's Will" again the same critic recognized the strong style of the 16th century, noble and daring rhythms, the "quintessence of passion," successes gained by the "courage of simplicity," rare specimens of compression as well as of sweetness.

She was the friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. in their lifetime, the acquaintance of George Henry Boker, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Russell Lowell, and John Boyle O'Reilly, and of Sarah Helen Whitman (the fiancée of Edgar Allan Poe), of Rose Terry Cooke and Nora Perry, of Stedman and Stoddard, Julia Ward Howe, Arlo Bates, Edward Everett Hale, William Dean Howells, William Winter, Anne Whitney, Alice Brown, Alicia Van Buren, and Louise Imogen Guiney.

Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1910) was direct and clear in its method, chronological and narrative rather than critical, compiled largely from the letters of Moulton and from the journal that was kept faithfully from age eight to the last days of failing health.

With due acknowledgment of Moulton's gifts of personal charm and poetic sentiment and refinement, few discriminating readers ascribed to her verses that quality of genius.