the death of Brann, and my throat chokes with sorrow and
my soul is sick with vain despair.

Brann's contribution to literature is the product of less than
three years of writing time. There were previous years of
yearning and dreaming while he fretted beneath the yoke of
galling servitude to newspaper editors unworthy to loose the
latchets of Brann's shoes. His own paper, The
Iconoclast, in which he first found freedom for utterance,
and from which ninety-eight per cent. of this present edition
is derived, ran for just forty months, and for six or eight
months of this period Brann was on lecture tours, during
which time his paper was largely filled with outside
contributions.

That a magazine could succeed at all in Waco is one of the
seven wonders of the literary world. That a magazine so
located and written by one man, having but a paltry
advertising patronage, no illustrations, no covers, could in
three years' time rival the circulation of any magazine then
published is as much a miracle as the parting of the Red
Sea waters or the bountiful persistence of the widow's oil.

It is on this three years' work that Brann's fame must rest.
Barring a few poets, the literary colossi have seldom had
less than the work of a score of years on which to base
their claims for greatness. Goethe, Hugo, Tolstoi, Mark
Twain each wrote for more than fifty years. But greater
range of variety and distance as well as span of time
contributed to their product. They traveled up and down