Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen

In which summer vacation begins with a joyous trip to the graveyard, a question of theological geography is cleared up, and Anne prepares for a visit from a literary luminary; and in which our narrator asks if anything interesting happened while he was gone.



Hey, remember me? Been a long time! Almost exactly a year to be specific, after which an escape back to Avonlea — which, apropos of nothing, is in Canada — is sounding really good.

First up, our cover this time around comes from a 1987 edition published by the Australian firm of Angus and Robertson, where they published the whole series with covers that included something breaking out of the frame for some reason. I'd like to think that this symbolized Anne's out-of-the-box thinking or something, but they probably did this with lots of other books as well. And frankly, I don't know if I really feel comfortable with a post-modern, fourth-wall-breaking Anne.

Now for notes!

8:35 - "How fair the realm / Imagination opens to the view." All right, I am totally drawing a blank on where this quotation comes from. All the sources I can find list Ms. Montgomery as its author, though it's clearly formatted as a quotation in the text. Moreover, Montgomery has quoted this more than once: in a 1903 diary entry (six year before Anne of Avonlea was published and in a 1927 letter, for instance, each time clearly delineated with quotation marks. Looking for only part of the phrase (in case she's paraphrasing) gets the same results. Anyone else have any ideas?

8:55 - "east o' the sun, west o' the moon." Oh good, this one's easy. This is from a Norwegian folk tale of the same name, where the title refers to the impossible-to-find location of the troll castle the heroine's husband was spirited away to. Also her husband was a bear. I think I may actually read this as our next Short Story Interlude, if only to tell you the personal connection I have with it and explain one of my more esoteric tags.

11:31 - "Not failure but low aim is crime." Helpfully, Mrs. Allan partly sources this one herself, attributing it to "Lowell." This turns out to be the American Romantic poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), from his poem "For an Autograph." The whole line reads

Greatly begin! though thou have time
But for a line, be that sublime,—
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

Which, FINE, I've already started recording again, sheesh. Quit bugging me, Lowell.

25:50 - "In the elder days of art / Builders wrought with greatest care / Each minute and unseen part / For the gods see everywhere" Ah, again helpfully sourced in the text! This is from "The Builders," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1850 collection The Seaside and the Fireside (the "Fireside" portion, in case you're curious). Longfellow, incidentally, was part of the group of 19-century New England poets called the Fireside Poets, which also included James Russell Lowell. Montgomery had certain preferences.

Oh, and you may have noticed that I've switched over to hosting my books on SoundCloud! This means you can more easily stream them to your phone through their handy app, where they're already helpfully parceled out into their own playlists. You can find all of my stuff here, where you can also favorite, make comments, subscribe, etc. At some point I'll go back and update all the old posts with the new embedded player.



If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!