"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." _Mrs. Moulton to Mr. Bates_ "OCTOBER 27, 1889. "I have been passing this rainy afternoon with your sonnets. I had read some of them more than once before, but this afternoon I have been quite alone save for their good company. I have read the strong, noble sequence through, from first to last, enjoying them more than ever. I like every one of them, but I had a pencil and paper by me and put down the numbers that most moved me. I see that my list is not short; do you care to see what it includes? It begins with the beautiful sonnet of dedication; then the first, with its wonderful procession of the gray days passing the torpid soul, and laying their 'curious fingers, chill and numb,' upon its wounds. Then the sixth, with the "... drowned sailors, lying lank and chill Under the sirupy green wave. And the fifteenth with its visions of love. "Never can joy surmise how long are sorrow's hours,