I’m trying to schedule posts in advance this month when I’m inspired (and have time), but today I was rather glad I hadn’t when I read this lovely passage in Elizabeth Goudge’s Linnets & Valerians to the kids at lunchtime. The uncle of the four children in this book has agreed to look after them providing they let him give them a classical education. They are rather surprised on the first day of lessons…
Uncle Ambrose did not have to call for attention twice, for in a few moments he had them spellbound. He was, they discovered, the most wonderful storyteller. Who would have thought that education was like this? He told them first about the land itself, and he took books down from his shelves and showed them pictures of the glories he had seen, mountains crowned with ruined palaces, statues and temples and shrines beside the sea. And all he described they saw with their inside eyes, so that the pictures in the books were scarcely necessary, and the words that he used fell chiming, so that they remembered the sequence of them as one remembers the sequence of the notes in a tune.
And later, Uncle Ambrose declares to the children that…
