One is a vision of her as one who knows no law, who leads me in strange highways and byways, and whose mind for me is a labyrinth wherein I walk in piteous confusion. One is a vision of her as an extremely wicked person whom I regard with fear, whom it behooves me to hate, but whom I love. One is a vision of her as a woman of any age who is, above all, uncompromising and unsympathetic. If I am joyous, she is placid; if I am heavy of heart, she is placid; if I am full of anticipation, she is placid; if I am in despair, she is placid. One is a vision of her as a shadow among shadows. She is not real, I say to myself. One day I shall awake and find her vanished--without pain and without “sadness of farewell,” and as if she had not been. One is a vision of her as one who is in the world and of the world, and like the rest of the world. And when I contemplate her thus my thought is, the best thing of all is to be in the world and of the world, and like the rest of the world,--to have the quality of humanness, to know the world so well as to be able to select the best of its treasures, and to make useful that in it which is useless. But all these visions are vapory. There is not one of them that is my friend Annabel Lee. ’Tis the expressions of her lily face that give me these visions--not that which she says nor that which she does. In truth she is, in some way, like all the visions, but each is mingled so much with herself that the type is lost. And my friend Annabel Lee, though she sits with the book of the two pages open before her and seems much interested in all that she finds in it, has yet the look of one who, if any one asked to borrow the book from her, would close it quickly and give it up readily with no regret. And after she had given away the book, it seems as if she would pick up a flower from somewhere near, and twirl the stem in her thumb and finger, and glance out the window. Not that she has a contempt for the present as for the future, but that it seems she is not dependent on the book of the two pages for her thought of it. But also there is method in her contempt for the future. For she deigns to consider that the future becomes the present, as one day follows after another. But she touches it not in good faith until it is indeed the present. My friend Annabel Lee, times, sits playing upon a little, old lute.