Nor is my anger born of the fact that Brann, as warped by his environment of time and place, wasted thought on free silver economics, spent passion on prohibition and negro criminals, lavished wrath on provincial preachers and local politicians or alloyed his style by the so-called "vulgarities," which alone could shock into attention the muddle-headed who paid his printer's bill for the privilege of seeing barnyard phrases and dunghill words in type. All this, I can conceive, may have been the particular combination of circumstances that were needed to bring to flower a germ of genius that, had it been planted in last century's Boston, might have given us but another Harvard classic--or environed in this century's Greenwich Village only another free-versifier of souls a-jaunt amid psycho-analytics and parlor Bolshevism. The slouch-hatted, gun-toting, beer-drinking, woman- worshiping, man-baiting Brann of Texas may have been the particular and only Brann to have developed the colossal courage and fighting fearlessness that gave his poet's soul the reach and stature, the strength and vigor to raise himself above the mere music of his words. Brann as he was when he heard the shot that killed him, I can accept and proclaim as beyond the need and reach of apology or regret. But what of the Brann that would have written on throughout the twenty-one years that have since elapsed, and that we would have with us still at the prime age of sixty-four? Had Brann lived! We should have had the product of eight times the period of his writing life that was; and an added quality born of riper experience, more momentous themes, more leisure for deliberate composition. We should have heard the man who against petty politicians and occasional pugilists, out-thundered Carlyle, turn his roaring guns against the blood-guilty heads that bade wholesale rape and gaunt hunger stalk rampant in a gory world. It is as if Hugo had written "Hans of Iceland" and no "Les Miserables," as if Napoleon, the Lieutenant of Artillery, had but stopped the mobs in the streets of Paris, and Austerlitz and Waterloo had never been. The world has not always profited by its martyrdoms. Samson, old and blind, toppled down the temple, and the Philistines that he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life. Not so Brann. His death was as tragic and pitiable as the charge of the Light Brigade, the sacrifice of men at the sunken road of Ohaine. Waste, futile and planless, mere howling, empty, chaotic waste, for no purpose under heaven but to serve as food for idle fancies as to what might have been--such to me is the death of Brann, and my throat chokes with sorrow and my soul is sick with vain despair.