defiant, and sublime; whose stature, though his feet be on
the flat of the Brazos bottom, towers effulgent over those
effigies placed on pedestals by orthodox popularity, and
sickly lighted by professorial praise.

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