old,
And the world was warm with the breath of spring;
And the roses red and the lilies white
Budded and bloomed for my heart's delight,
And the birds in my heart began to sing.

A winsome little sprite seems Ellen Louise to have been, revealing, even in her earliest years, a quaint touch of her father's courtly dignity combined with her mother's refinement and unerring sense of the amenities of life. Mrs. Chandler's fastidious taste and a certain innate instinct for the fitness of things, invested her always with a personal elegance that surrounded her like an atmosphere. A picture lived in her daughter's memory of her arriving one day, in a bonnet with pink roses, to visit the school; and of her own childish thought that no other little girl had so pretty a mother as her own. In after years she pictured, in one of her sonnets, this beloved mother:

The little maid's schooldays seem to have begun before she was out of the nursery, for a tiny relic has drifted down the years, in the form of a very brilliant rose painted on a slip of paper,—the paper faded and yellow with age, the rose as fresh as if colored yesterday,—bearing the legend: "Miss Ellen L. Chandler deserves my approbation for good behavior in school. Charlotte Taintor." And this documentary evidence of the good behavior of "Miss Ellen" is dated August, 1839, when she was but little past her fourth birthday. It is pleasant to know that the future poet began her earthly career in a fashion so exemplary; and a further testimonial exists in a page which has survived for nearly seventy years, on which a relative, a friendly old gentleman, had written, in 1840, lines "To Little Ellen," which run in part:

This artless ditty continues through many stanzas, and contains one line at which the reader to-day can but smile sympathetically:

Thy seraph voice with music breathing;

for this rhapsodical phrase connects itself with the many tributes paid in later life to her "golden voice." Whittier, expressing his desire to meet "the benediction of thy face," alludes also to the music of her tones. That the voice is an index of the soul is a theory which may easily be accepted by those who have in memory the clear, soft speech of Mrs. Moulton. Often was she playfully entreated to

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:

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.

Among the schoolmates of her childish years was the boy who was afterward the artist Whistler, who was one year her senior. As children they often walked home from school together, and one night the little girl was bewailing that she could not draw a map like the beautiful one he had displayed to an admiring group that day. It was a gorgeous creation in colored crayons, an "arrangement" that captivated the village school with much the same ardor that the future artist was destined to inspire from the art connoisseurs of two continents. A sad object, indeed, was the discordant affair that Ellen Louise held up in self-abasement and hopelessness while she poured out her enthusiasm on his achievement. The lad received this praise with lofty scorn. "That's nothing," he exclaimed; "you think this is anything? Take it; I don't want it; you just see what I can do to-morrow! I'll bring you then something worth talking about." And with the precious trophy in her possession, the little girl made her way home. True to his word, the next morning "Jimmy" brought her a package whose very wrapping revealed the importance of its contents; and when she had breathlessly opened it, there was disclosed an exquisite little painting. Under a Gothic arch that breathed—no one knew what enchanted hints of "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," or some far-away dreams of Venice, or other dimly prefigured marvel in the child's fancy, was an old monk; through the picture were silver gleams, and a vague glint of purple, and altogether, it held some far prophecy of the brilliant future yet undisclosed. All her life Mrs. Moulton kept the gift. It had an unobtrusive place in her drawing-room, and even figured modestly at the great Whistler exhibition which was held in Boston by the Copley Society after the death of the artist.

In some ways Ellen Louise had a rather lonely childhood save that an imaginative and poetic nature peoples a world of its own. The little girl