Page:My Friend Annabel Lee (1903).pdf/205

 mind and when to leave it. And whosoever may have it, thus brought to a state of perfection, is a most fortunate possessor and must need go bravely down the world.

"Perhaps, now," said my friend Annabel Lee, "when one is a goose-girl and goes to eat at a deal table under a green yew-tree, one should contemplate only kings in gilded palaces. One should begin at the beginning of a king's life, it may be, and follow it step by step through heaviness and strife until one sees, in one's vivid goose-girl fancy, the king at last tottering and white-haired and forsaken toward his lonely grave.

"Or else one should contemplate the life of a laborer who must eat husks all his days, and is not worthy of his hire, and goes from bad to worse and becomes a beggar.