Page:My Friend Annabel Lee (1903).pdf/34

 have seen humanity, oh, so brutal, oh, so barbarous as ever it could have been in merrie England in the reign of good old Harry the Eighth.

"And so then that is very interesting."

"In truth it is so," said my friend Annabel Lee.

"Boston is fair, and very fair.—Tell me more."

"And times," I said, "I sit in one of the window-seats on the stairway of the Public Library. And I look at the walls. A Frenchman with a marvelous fancy and great skill in his finger-ends has worked on those walls. He painted there the emblems of all the world's great material things of all ages. And over them he painted a thin gray veil of those things that are not material, that come from no age, that are with us, around us, above us—as they were with the children of Israel, with the dwellers in Pompeii, with