Among the special friendships of Mrs. Moulton's life of both literary and personal interest, one of the most important and enjoyable to her was that with Professor Arlo Bates, the poet and romancist, whose work she appreciated highly and whose sympathetic companionship gave her great pleasure. With him she felt a peculiar sympathy, and to him she wrote a series of letters, extending over many years, beginning in the decade of the eighties. The extracts presented from these are here grouped, as, while they thus lose a strict chronological thread, they gain in a more complete representation, and their nature is such that the precise date (rarely given, indeed, as they were mostly dated by a month only) is, in any case, negligible in importance. The extracts chosen deal almost exclusively with literary matters. The only son of Professor Bates, in his twentieth year, afterward the author of "A Madcap Cruise," whom Mrs. Moulton playfully called "Prince Oric," and to whom in his sixth year she wrote a delicious sonnet under that title, is alluded to, as well as is his mother, who wrote over the pen-name Eleanor Putnam. _Mrs. Moulton to Arlo Bates_ "... Thanks for the charming book. My love to the sweetest wife I know. Thank her for her letter...." "... Your letter about Marston's songs came to me when he and William Sharp happened to be passing the evening with me. I read it aloud, to Mr. Marston's great delight. It quite went to his heart.... I am so sorry I shall not find you and Mrs. Bates where you were last year. That desperate flirtation with Master Oric is off entirely...." "... I have just been reading 'Childe Roland,' and it baffles me, as it has so often done before. I feel less sure that I understand it than any other of Browning's poems. Is the Black Tower Death, do you think? But what a wonderful poem it is! I suppose spiritual judgments concern themselves with spiritual states...." "... I am delighted with what you say of Mr. Marston's poem in _Harper's_, because I think the poem too subtle and delicate to be appreciated, save by the very elect; and I am also delighted because what you said gave him so much pleasure. Marston said of you, 'What a wonderful psychological vein, almost as powerful as that of Browning, runs through many of the poems of Mr. Bates.'..."