“Oh, some forgotten Englishwoman,” said Annabel Lee. “I believe her name was Edwards. She perhaps wrote a poem, now and then, and died.”
“And are the poems forgotten, also?” I inquired.
“Yes, forgotten, except by a few. But when they remember them, they remember them long.”
“Then which is better, to be remembered, and remembered shortly, by the multitudes; or to be forgot by the multitudes and remembered long by the one or two?”
“It is incomparably better to be remembered long by the one or two,” said Annabel Lee. “To be forgotten by any one or anything that once remembered you is sorely bitter to the heart.”
[IX
RELATIVE]
“DO YOU think, Annabel Lee,” I said to her on a day that I felt depressed, “that all things must really be relative, and that those which are not now properly relative will eventually become so, though it gives them acute anguish?”
The face of Annabel Lee was placid, and also the sea. The one glanced down upon me from the shelf, and the other spread away into the distance.