21.12-18: a minor hymnist’s paradise, a future America of alabaster buildings one hundred stories high . . . to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea: Echoes “America the Beautiful,” the unofficial second national anthem of the USA, by the “minor hymnist” (and English professor at Wellesley College, where Nabokov himself taught between 1941 and 1948) Katherine Lee Bates (1859-1929). For “alabaster buildings,” see ll. 27-28 below, “Thine alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears!”; for “pilgrims,” see l. 9ff. (“for pilgrims’ feet . . . A thoroughfare for freedom . . . / Across the wilderness!”); for “from dark to shining sea,” see ll. 8 and 32 (“From sea to shining sea”). (The Kyoto Reading Circle was the first to note the “from sea to shining sea” echo.) [ snipped the lyrics here]