friends everywhere, and that he retained them to the last speaks for the
whole-heartedness and genuineness of his nature.

To two weaknesses he frankly confessed: that he was inclined to be
superstitious and that he was afraid of the dark. One of these he
stoutly defended, asserting that he who was not fearful in the dark was
a dull clod, utterly devoid of imagination. From his earliest childhood
my brother was a devourer of fairy tales, and he continually stored his
mind with fantastic legends, which found a vent in new shapes in his
verses and prose tales. In the ceiling of one of his dens a trap-door
led into the attic, and as this door was open he seriously contemplated
closing it, because, as he said, he fancied that queer things would come
down in the night and spirit him away. It is not to be inferred that he
thus remained in a condition of actual fear, but it is true that he was
imaginative to the degree of acute nervousness, and, like a child,
associated light with safety and darkness with the uncanny and the
supernatural. It was after all the better for his songs that it was so,
else they might not have been filled with that cheery optimism which
praised the happiness of sunlight and warmth, and sought to lift
humanity from the darkness of despondency.

This weakness, or intellectual virtue as he pleasantly regarded it, was
perhaps rather stronger in him as a man than in his boyhood. He has
himself declared that he wrote "Seein' Things at Night" more to solace
his own feelings than to delineate the sufferings of childhood, however
aptly it may describe them. And when he put into rhythm that "any color,
so long as it's red, is the color that suits me best," he spoke not only
as a poet but as a man, for red conveyed to him the idea of warmth and
cheeriness, and seemed to express to him in color his temperamental
demand. All through his life he pandered to these feelings instead of