Warning: If you have a visual impairment, use the manuscript transcript version including the Lucy Maud Montgomery’s foot notes and contextual annotation references.

Chapter 37 - (VERSO)

611 685

Green Gables affairs slipped into their old groove and work was done and duties fulfilled with regularity as before, although always with the aching sense of “loss in all familiar things.” Anne, new to grief, thought it almost sad that it could be so—that they could go on in the old way without Matthew. She felt something like shame when she and remorse when she discovered that the sunrises (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)behind the firs(end superscript) and the pale pink buds opening in the garden gave her the old (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)inrush of(end superscript) gladness when she saw them—that Diana’s visits were pleasant to her and that Diana’s merry words and ways moved her to laughter and smiles—that, in brief, the beautiful world of


TEXT ANNOTATION

"loss in all familiar things": A line from the long poem Snow-bound: A Winter Idyl, 1865 by John Greenleaf Whittier, in which, mourning the recent loss of his younger sister, he speaks in this stanza of the "something" missing from everything now that she is not alive: "But still I wait with ear and eye / For something gone which should be nigh, / A loss in all familiar things, / In flower that blooms, and bird that sings." (See also Annotated Anne, p. 382, n. 2.)