can accept and proclaim as beyond the need and reach of
apology or regret. But what of the Brann that would have
written on throughout the twenty-one years that have since
elapsed, and that we would have with us still at the prime
age of sixty-four?

Had Brann lived! We should have had the product of eight
times the period of his writing life that was; and an added
quality born of riper experience, more momentous themes,
more leisure for deliberate composition. We should have
heard the man who against petty politicians and occasional
pugilists, out-thundered Carlyle, turn his roaring guns
against the blood-guilty heads that bade wholesale rape
and gaunt hunger stalk rampant in a gory world.

It is as if Hugo had written "Hans of Iceland" and no "Les
Miserables," as if Napoleon, the Lieutenant of Artillery, had
but stopped the mobs in the streets of Paris, and Austerlitz
and Waterloo had never been.

The world has not always profited by its martyrdoms.
Samson, old and blind, toppled down the temple, and the
Philistines that he slew at his death were more than they
which he slew in his life. Not so Brann. His death was
as tragic and pitiable as the charge of the Light Brigade,
the sacrifice of men at the sunken road of Ohaine.

Waste, futile and planless, mere howling, empty, chaotic
waste, for no purpose under heaven but to serve as food
for idle fancies as to what might have been--such to me is