Page:My Friend Annabel Lee (1903).pdf/245

 sounds as if you were looking forward to it."

"I can't see that it sounds that way, at all," said I.

"Of course you can't," said my friend Annabel Lee. "You wrote the verse, and you are but you."

"And what are some of the other things that it betrays?" I inquired.

"It betrays," said my friend Annabel Lee, "that you are better in detail than you are in the entire. And if that is true of you in one thing it is true of you in everything. I daresay your friends find things in you that they like extremely, but you in the entire they look upon as something that has much to acquire."

"Not my friends?" said I.

"Yes, your friends," said my friend Annabel Lee.

"That is a bitter thing for a verse to