ellauri014.html on line 1770: Like Bryant’s poem, this verse is about autumnal flowers. With some searching I found this poem in the 1884 New Year’s edition of Godey’s Lady’s Book. “Tam! The Story of a Woman” by Ella Rodman Church and August De Bubna includes this poem. In the story the verses are found in a copy of Bryant’s poetry–hence Montgomery’s connection to the poem–but in the (relatively boring) story they are actually written on a slip of paper that was found in the Bryant book–and written by a woman who tentatively hopes to make a career as a poet in a male’s publishing world. Intriguingly, Montgomery seems to have forgotten the original context of the verse, but herself emulated the desire of “Miss Powell” in the story.
ellauri048.html on line 1747: To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
xxx/ellauri123.html on line 769: One of the first things Nabokov makes a point of saying is that, despite John Ray Jr.'s claim in the Foreword, there is no moral to the story. Nabokov concludes the afterword with a reference to his beloved first language, which he abandoned as a writer once he moved to the United States in 1940: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian language for a second-rate brand of English." Alas, that 'wonderful Russian language' which, I imagined, still awaits me somewhere, which blooms like a faithful spring behind the locked gate to which I, after so many years, still possess the key, turned out to be non-existent, and there is nothing beyond that gate, except for some burned out stumps and hopeless autumnal emptiness, and the key in my hand looks rather like a lock pick. Or floppy prick."
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