Page:My Friend Annabel Lee (1903).pdf/242

 all. She, for her part, would call it not yet quite ripe.

"That's the verse," said my friend Annabel Lee. "As for the meaning of the words in it, that betrays many things. The most vivid thing it betrays is your age. It shows that you have passed over the period of nineteen and have arrived at exactly one-and-twenty. And therefore it is a triumphant bit of verse.

"Don't you know," said my friend Annabel Lee, "how much verse there is thrown upon the world that means nothing whatsoever? And so when one does happen upon a bit of it that tells even the smallest thing, like the height of the writer, or the color of his hair, then one feels repaid.

"And your verse tells still other things," said my friend Annabel Lee. "One is that you still think, as we've agreed once