"It is a beautiful book, Louise, and the spirit of it is tender, dreamlike and sorrowful.... The pathos of it affects me strongly. Life appeals more strongly to you than the pageantry. There is more fancy in your poems and more alacrity and variety of thought, but the quality that impresses me is feeling. I am not a critic, but somehow I must feel that I know a good thing when I see it, and I am sure that no one but a true artist in poetry could have written those stanzas called 'Now and Then.' The music has been running in my mind for days and days, "And had you loved me then, my dear. I think you are very kind to remember me and to send such a lovely offering to me at Christmas. God bless you! and may this new year be happy for you, and the harbinger of many happier years to follow." Some years later the Scotch critic, Professor Meiklejohn, sent to Mrs. Moulton a series of comments which he had made while reading "Swallow Flights," "in the intervals of that fearful kind of business called Examination;" and some of these may be quoted before the book is passed for other matters. "The word 'waiting' in the line 'White moons made beautiful the waiting night,' is full of emotional and imaginative memory. "In 'A Painted Fan' the line 'The soft, south wind of memory blows,' is another instance of a perfect poetical thought, perfectly expressed. "Two lines of an unforgettable beauty are 'The flowers and love stole sweetness from the sun; The short, sweet lives of summer things are done.' "And a line Shelley himself might have been proud to own is 'No bird-note quivers on the frosty air.' "The lines 'He must, who would give life, Be lord of death:' and 'Shall a life which found no sun In death find God?' express musically a mystic thought. "The sonnet 'In Time to Come' is one of astonishing crescendo. The lines 'And you sit silent in the silent place, ... You will be weary then for the dead days, And mindful of their sweet and bitter ways, Though passion into memory shall have grown.' "This is very poetry of very poetry. You must look for your poetic brethren among the noble lyrists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Your insight, your subtlety, your delicacy, your music, are hardly matched, and certainly not surpassed, by Herrick or Campion or Carew or Herbert or Vaughan."