"DEAR MRS MOULTON: Your beautiful little volume charms us all. It is worth a bower of song, and I am rightly sensible of the gift. You are getting to a mastery of the sonnet that is rare, and the lyrics are exquisite. I hope you will now be taking some substantial theme, a narrative, for ampler exercise of your powers. I am hard at work and nearing the end of a work that has held me for some time. I have not been in London since the day of Browning's funeral,--a sad one, but having its glory. I had a tinge of apprehension the other day in hearing of Russell Lowell's illness. We have been reassured about him. Boston, I suppose, will soon be losing you...." In the years directly following its publication, "In the Garden of Dreams" went rapidly through several editions. One sonnet which elicited much praise was that called HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. Because I seek Thee not, oh seek Thou me! Because my lips are dumb, oh hear the cry I do not utter as Thou passest by And from my life-long bondage set me free! Because, content, I perish far from Thee, Oh, seize me, snatch me from my fate, and try My soul in Thy consuming fire! Draw nigh And let me, blinded, Thy salvation see. If I were pouring at Thy feet my tears, If I were clamoring to see Thy face, I should not need Thee, Lord, as now I need, Whose dumb, dead soul knows neither hopes nor fears, Nor dreads the outer darkness of this place-- _Because_ I seek not, pray not, give Thou heed! The deeply religious feeling, the profound sincerity, and what might perhaps not inaptly be called the completely modern mood of this, a mood which in its essence is permanent but which in its outward form varies with each generation, gave it a power of wide appeal. A church paper in England said of it: "Profound faith in the infinite goodness of God is the spirit which animates most of Mrs. Moulton's work. The sonnet ... deserves a place among the best devotional verse in the language. It is a question if, outside of the volume of Miss Rossetti, any devotional verse to equal this can be found in the work of a living woman-writer." The critic need hardly have limited himself to the poetry of women. Mrs. Moulton was all her life vitally interested in the religious side of life, and many more of her letters might have been quoted to show how constantly her mind returned to the question of immortality and human responsibility. The sonnet had become for her a natural mode of utterance, as it was for Mrs. Browning when she wrote the magnificent sequence which recorded her love; and in this especial poem is the essence of Mrs. Moulton's spiritual life.