“If you have wanted happiness and have hungered and thirsted, after there came the message of a tender soul, you were content with a branch from a green pine-tree. “If you have felt a thousand tender things and have drunk from a thousand cups and then have been about to write it in black lettering that all, _all_ have failed you--if then there came the message of a tender soul, you have written instead that nothing has failed you, and you have turned back your footsteps and have tried it all again. “If for you and me to-day there should come over frozen hills and green meadows from a far country the message of a tender soul, should we shiver when it is dark and should we dread the coming of the years, and should we consider what would bring weariness and what would bring rest, and should we measure and contemplate? But no. For the message of a tender soul is a message from one that has found the quiet and is absolutely at peace, and has gone so far toward the stars and so far and wide over the green earth that she has indeed reached the truth, and her soul gives of its tenderness without thinking, and without knowing, and all in the dark. “And when we should feel the message, all without knowing, there would come again that long-since faith, and that fullness of life, and that sense of realness, and the shining of the sun would be of new meaning. “It may be,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “that we will have to go still farther into the wilderness before the message comes, and it may be also that it will not come for many years. “But it is in all ways comforting to know there is such a thing.” More than I considered the message that might come, I considered the voice with no hardness but with softness, and the lily face of my friend Annabel Lee. XXIII ME TO MY FRIEND ANNABEL LEE I wrote the day before yesterday this letter to my friend Annabel Lee: Montreal. ---- Dear Fair Lady: Since I have come to stay in Montreal for a time, and you still in Boston, I have seen you, times, even more vividly than when I was there. You come into my dreams at dead of night. Can you imagine what you are in my dreams? I look forward impatiently to the end of my time here, so that I may go to find you again;--but my impatience grows someway less when I think that if I am with you this vision may vanish from my dreams.---- I will write you of some of the things I have found here. There is much in Montreal that takes me back into the dim mists--the wonderful days when I had lived only three years. It was not here, but farther west--still what is in Canada is Canadian and does not change nor vary. This Canadian land and water and air awakens shadow-things in my memory and visions and voices of the world as it was when I was three.