“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 before, of that which will one day open wondrously for you.” “I did not agree to that, you know,” said I. “Well, then, I agreed to it for both of us,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “And your verse betrays that so plainly that one is led to feel that there are persons who grow more hopeful with each bit of darkness that comes to them. If your life were all fire and sunshine you would write very different verse. And if it told anything at all it would tell that while you looked forward to still more fire and sunshine, you would somehow know you were not really to have any more, but that it would grow less and less in the years, and by the time you were an old lady, and still not nearly ready to die, it would give out entirely.” “That would be by the law of compensation,” said I. “And it would require a great deal of fire and sunshine in her early life to compensate any one who had grown into an old lady and had run out of it.” “So it would,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “Now, when you grow old--though you will never be that which is called an old lady--you will be quite mellow. And probably the less you have to be mellow over, the mellower you will be.” “I don’t wish to be that way,” said I. “I think that kind of person is pitiful, living year after year.” “You’ll not be pitiful,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “You can not be mellow and pitiful at the same time. It may be that to be mellow is the best thing, and the most comfortable. It maybe that people struggle through a long life with but one object in their minds--to be mellow in their old age. This verse certainly 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.