Annabel Lee is like no one you have known. She is quite unlike them all. Times I almost can feel a subtle, conscious love coming from her finger-tips to my forehead. And I, at one-and-twenty, am thrilled with thrills.
Forsooth, at one-and-twenty, in spite of Boston and all, there are moments when one can yet thrill.
But other times I look up and perchance her eyes will meet mine with a look that is cold and penetrating and contemptuous and confounding.
Other times I look up and see her eyes full of indifference, full of tranquillity, full of dull deadly quiet.
Came Annabel Lee from out of Boylston street in Boston. And lo, she was so adorable, so fascinating, so lovable, that straightway I adored her; I was fascinated by her; I loved her.
I love her tenderly. For why, I know not. How can there be accounting for the places one’s loves will rest?
Sometimes my friend Annabel Lee is negative and sometimes she is positive.
Sometimes when my mind seems to have wandered infinitely far from her I realize suddenly that ’tis she who holds it enthralled. Whatsoever I see in Boston or in the vision of the wide world my judgment of it is prejudiced in ways by the existence of my friend Annabel Lee—the more so that it’s mostly unconscious prejudice.
Annabel Lee’s is an intense personality—one meets with intense personalities now and again, in children or in bull-dogs or in persons like my friend Annabel Lee.
And I never tire of looking at Annabel Lee, and I never tire of listening to her, and I never tire of thinking about her.