"... I am ashamed that two weeks have gone by since I received your noble book, 'Told in the Gate.' I have not been so neglectful of it as it seems. I have not only taken my own pleasure in it, but I have shown it to other poets who are interested in knowing what is being done in America. It is a beautiful book externally—how beautiful it is internally I am sure the world of readers will eagerly perceive; but never one of them can love it more than I do. Even in print it is hard for me to say which poem I prefer. There is not one among them that is not well done from the point of art, and thrillingly interesting as a story. The lyrics star the book like gems. They sing themselves over and over to my listening mind.... I feel a glow of exultant pride that the author is my friend. I am proud and glad to have my name inscribed in a volume I so admire and love. I am enjoying London as I always do.... I go toward the end of August to pay some visits in Scotland, and then to visit Lady Ashburton in Hampshire and after that to Paris. I enclose some foreign stamps for the young Prince.... Your poems are among the pleasures of my life."
Of the sonnets of Mr. Bates Mrs. Moulton wrote:
"... Dante breathed through the sonnet the high aspirations of that love which shaped and determined his soul's life. By sonnets it was that Petrarch wedded immortally his name to that of his ever-wooed, never-won Laura of Avignon. Strong Michael Angelo wrote sonnets for that noble lady, Vittoria Colonna, whose hand he kissed only after Death had kissed the soul from her pure lips.
"The one personal intimacy with Shakespeare to which any of his worshippers have been admitted is such as comes from loving study of his sonnets, in 'sessions of sweet, silent thought.' The sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning burned with the pure flame of her perfect love. In the sonnets of 'The House of Life' Rossetti commemorated that love and loss so passionate and so abiding that it seemed to him the whole of life. In the sonnets of 'Song-Tide' Marston sang the praises of his early love, as in those of 'All In All' he bewailed her loss; and his sonnets of later years throb like a tell-tale heart with the profoundest melancholy out of whose depths a human soul ever cried for pity.
"Such and thus intimate have been the revelations made through this form of verse—so rigid, yet so plastic and so human.
"To the list of these sonneteers who have thus sounded the deepest depths of love and sorrow, the name of Arlo Bates has now been added, by the publication of his noble and sincere 'Sonnets in Shadow.' Born of one man's undying pain, these sonnets at once become, through the subtlety of their research into the innermost depths of human emotion, the property and the true expression of all souls who have loved and suffered.
"A few of us know, personally, the rare charm, the exquisite loveliness, of her thus royally honored and passionately lamented; and all of us who read can feel that thus and thus our own hearts might be wrung by such a loss—that in us, also, if we have souls at all, such sorrow might bear fruit in kindred emotion, even though for want of words our lips be dumb. It seems to me that it is the dumb souls—who feel all that the poet has sung, and yet cannot break the silence with a cry—who owe the deepest debt to this, their interpreter."