“‘It has gnawed like a wolf at my heart, mother, A wolf that is fierce for blood, All the livelong day and the night, beside-- Gnawing for lack of food. I dreamed of bread in my sleep, mother, And the sight was heaven to see-- I awoke with an eager, famishing lip, But you had no bread for me. “‘How could I look to you, mother, How could I look to you For bread to give to your starving boy, When you were starving, too? For I read the famine in your cheek And in your eye so wild, And I felt it in your bony hand, As you laid it on your child. “‘The queen has lands and gold, mother, The queen has lands and gold, While you are forced to your empty breast A skeleton babe to hold-- A babe that is dying of want, mother, As I am dying now, With a ghastly look in its sunken eye And the famine upon its brow. “‘What has poor Ireland done, mother, What has poor Ireland done, That the world looks on and sees us die, Perishing one by one? Do the men of England care not, mother, The great men and the high, For the suffering sons of Erin’s isle,-- Whether they live or die? “‘There’s many a brave heart here, mother, Dying of want and cold, While only across the channel, mother, Are many that roll in gold. There are great and proud men there, mother, With wondrous wealth to view, And the bread they fling to their dogs to-night Would bring life to me and you. “‘Come nearer to my side, mother, Come nearer to my side, And hold me fondly, as you held My father when he died. Quick, for I can not see you, mother, My breath is almost gone. Mother, dear mother, ere I die, Give me three grains of corn!’ “What do you think,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “is it not full of power and poetry and pathos?” “Yes, it could not in itself be better,” I replied. “And it has the simplicity.” “And pretends nothing,” said Annabel Lee. “And who wrote it?” I asked. “Oh, some forgotten Englishwoman,” said Annabel Lee. “I believe her name was Edwards. She perhaps wrote a poem, now and then, and died.” “And are the poems forgotten, also?” I inquired. “Yes, forgotten, except by a few. But when they remember them, they remember them long.” “Then which is better, to be remembered, and remembered shortly, by the multitudes; or to be forgot by the multitudes and remembered long by the one or two?” “It is incomparably better to be remembered long by the one or two,” said Annabel Lee. “To be forgotten by any one or anything that once remembered you is sorely bitter to the heart.” IX RELATIVE “Do you think, Annabel Lee,” I said to her on a day that I felt depressed, “that all things must really be relative, and that those which are not now properly relative will eventually become so, though it gives them acute anguish?”