MY friend Annabel Lee and I are similar to each other in a few, few ways. Daily we contemplate together a great, blank wall built up of dull, blue stones. It stands before us and we can not get over it, for it is too high; neither can we walk around it, for it is too long; and we can not go through it, for it is solid and very thick. It is directly across the road. We have both come but a short way on the road—so short that we can easily look back over our course to the point where we started. We did not walk together from there, but we have met each other now before the great, blank wall of blue stones.
We have stopped here, for we can not go on.
I wonder and conjecture much about the wall, and my friend Annabel Lee regards it sometimes with interest and sometimes with none.
And, times, we forget all about the wall and merely sit and rest in the shade it casts, or walk back on the road, or in the grass about it, or pluck a few wild sweet berries from the stunted wayside briers.
And, too, when a thunder storm comes up and the air is full of wind and rain slanting and whistling about us, we crouch close against the base of the wall, and we do not become so wet as we should were there no wall.
But that is only when the wind is from beyond it.
When the wind with its flood of rain comes toward us as we crouch by the wall we are beaten and drenched and buffeted and driven hard against that cold, blue surface. And the ragged edges of the rocks make bruises on our foreheads.
Some days we become exceeding weary with looking at the great blank wall—and with having looked at it already for many a day, and many a day.
"It is so high and so thick," I say.
"It is so long," says my friend Annabel Lee.
To all appearances we have gone as far upon the road as we ever can go. We can not get over the wall of blue stones—and we can not walk round—and we can not go through. There is nothing to indicate that it will ever be removed.
The field for conjecture as to what lies on the other side of the road is so vast that we do not venture to conjecture.
But we have talked often and madly of the wall itself.
"Perhaps," I say, "it is that the wall is placed here before our eyes to hide from us our limitations."
"Perhaps," says my friend Annabel Lee, "it is that the wall itself is our limitations."
Which, if it is true, is very damnable.
For though human beings have done some divine things they have never gone beyond their limitations.
The blue of the stones in the wall is not a dark blue, but it is very cold. It is the color that is called stone blue.
It never changes.
The sun and the shade look alike upon it; and the wet rain does not brighten it; neither do thick clouds of dust make it dull.
It is stone blue.
Except for this:
Once in a number of days, in fair weather or foul, there will come upon the wide blankness a rippling like gold.
It lingers a second and vanishes—and appears again. And then it's gone until another time.
How tender, how lovely, how bright is the golden ripple against the cold, cold blue!
It is come and gone in a minute.
We do not know its coming or its going.
But while we see it our hearts beat high and fast.
"It may be," I say when it is gone, "that this golden ripple will show us some way to get beyond the wall where things are divine."
"It may be," says my friend Annabel Lee, "that the golden ripple will show us something divine among these few things on this side of the wall."
My friend, Annabel Lee—with your strong, brave little heart and your two strong little hands, you were with me in my weary, bitter day. You were brave enough for two. It is to you from me that a message will go from out of silences and over frozen hills in the years that are coming.
The end
Printed by R. R. Donnelley
and Sons Company, at the
Lakeside Press, Chicago, Ill.
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