Brann's contribution to literature is the product of less than three years of writing time. There were previous years of yearning and dreaming while he fretted beneath the yoke of galling servitude to newspaper editors unworthy to loose the latchets of Brann's shoes. His own paper, The Iconoclast, in which he first found freedom for utterance, and from which ninety-eight per cent. of this present edition is derived, ran for just forty months, and for six or eight months of this period Brann was on lecture tours, during which time his paper was largely filled with outside contributions. That a magazine could succeed at all in Waco is one of the seven wonders of the literary world. That a magazine so located and written by one man, having but a paltry advertising patronage, no illustrations, no covers, could in three years' time rival the circulation of any magazine then published is as much a miracle as the parting of the Red Sea waters or the bountiful persistence of the widow's oil. It is on this three years' work that Brann's fame must rest. Barring a few poets, the literary colossi have seldom had less than the work of a score of years on which to base their claims for greatness. Goethe, Hugo, Tolstoi, Mark Twain each wrote for more than fifty years. But greater range of variety and distance as well as span of time contributed to their product. They traveled up and down the world of men, mingled with many races, sailed seas, climbed mountains, lived in metropoles, and dined with princes. Brann's most notable personal acquaintances were country- town editors and provincial politicians, very like the ilk of a hundred other States and provinces in the raw corners of the world. He lived and died in that stale, flat, and literarily unprofitable expanse of prairie between Lake Michigan and the Rio Grande, where man's most pretentious achievement was the Ead's Bridge at St. Louis, Nature's most spectacular effort, the Ozark Mountains, and literature's most worthy resident representative, William Marion Reedy. So environed, in a time when the bicycle marked the acme of progress and Bryan could be a hero, in a flat-roofed Texas town, whose intellectual glory was a Baptist college and whose answer to arguments, "ropes and revolvers," Brann wrote for only three years, and wrote as Shakespeare wrote, unmindful alike of critics, binders and bookworms. Only by the doubtful faith that men are made by their adversity can we reconcile our charge against the Sower who cast the seed of genius to fall on such barren ground, amid the stones of a sterile time and the briars of bullet-answering bigotry. But vain are the might-have-beens; and fortunate are we to have as we have the stuff out of which far-ringing fame resounds unto generations when teeth are no longer set on edge--when men will have forgotten the taboos of a little day and the dust of our Mrs. Grundys will be weeds to choke the freedom of the grass.