George MacDonald - Reflections

"...helping to set him in right atomic position toward other human atoms. ….what I have ventured to call the rhythm of his manner came of his love of verse, and of the true material of verse."

George Macdonald

(From "There and Back," CHAPTER VIII, A LOST SHOE)

"The youth's manners had a certain—what shall I call it?—not polish, but rhythm, which came of, or at least was nourished by his love of the finer elements in literature. His friendly converse with books, & through them with certain of the dead who still speak, fell in with yet deeper influences..."

(From "Robert Falconer," Part II, CHAPTER XXIII, ROBERT FINDS A NEW INSTRUMENT)

"...but saw level-winged forms of light speeding off with a message to the nations. It was only his roused phantasy; but a sweet tone is nevertheless a messenger of God; and a right harmony and sequence of such tones is a little gospel."

George MacDonald

"...so far aloft in the sunny air rang the responsive notes, that his dream appeared almost realized. The music, like a fountain bursting upwards, drew him up and bore him aloft. From the resounding cone of bells overhead he no longer heard their tones proceed..."

"One hundred bells hang in that tower of wonder, an instrument for a city, nay, for a kingdom. Often had Robert dreamed that he was the galvanic centre of a thunder-cloud of harmony, flashing off from every finger the willed lightning tone: such was the unexpected scale of this instrument—..."

"...and if he isn't cross, nothing is more certain to make him cross, without giving him a moment's time to consult the better part of him."

George MacDonald

(From "Guild Court," CHAPTER XIII - MOTHER AND DAUGHTER)

"...Indeed, she generally put her husband into good humour by treating him as if he were in a far better humour than he really was in. It never does any good to tell a man that he is cross. If he is, it makes him no better, even though it should make him vexed with himself; ..."

"Mrs. Boxall's good-natured audacity generally carried everything before it, even with more dangerous persons than her own husband. He could not help—I do not say smiling, but trying to smile; and though the smile was rather a failure, Mrs. Boxall chose to take it for one..."

"...or possibly as not feeling the necessity of coming to a conclusion, and therefore preferring to allow the conclusion to grow instead of constructing one for immediate use. This I rather liked than otherwise."

George Macdonald

(From "The Seaboard Parish," CHAPTER V, MR. PERCIVALE)

"During our meal, he made himself quite agreeable; talked well on the topics of the day, not altogether as a man who had made up his mind, but not the less, rather the more, as a man who had thought about them, and one who did not find it so easy to come to a conclusion as most people do—..."

(From: "Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood," CHAPTER XIX - THE INVALID)

“It must be something imperishable,—something which in its own nature is. If instead of a gem, or even of a flower, we could cast the gift of a lovely thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving, as the angels, I suppose, must give."

George MacDonald

"…what is the most precious gift one person can give another?”
…

"...In the worst cases of suffering, I think there is help given which those who look on cannot understand, but which enables the sufferer to endure."

George MacDonald

(From "Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood," CHAPTER XXXII, THE PEAT-STACK)

"…we need not anticipate evil: that is to send out for the suffering. It is well to be prepared for it, but it is ill to brood over a fancied future of evil. In all my life, my boy—and I should like you to remember what I say—I have never found any trial go beyond what I could bear..."

"...of whom some would doubtless have got out of their difficulties sooner than he—only he was more honorable in debt than they were out of it."

George MacDonald

(From "Warlock o' Glenwarlock," CHAPTER II, THE KITCHEN)

"…to his sense of the misprision of neighbours and friends, came the faith and indignant confidence of his wife like the closing and binding up and mollifying of a wound with ointment. The man was of a far finer nature than any of those who thus judged him..."

"His marriage…set him growing again—and that is the only final path out of oppression.

"…From the day almost of his marriage the miseries of life lost half their bitterness, nor had it returned at her death…"

(From "St.George and St. Michael," CHAPTER XIX. THE ENCHANTED CHAIR)

"…the unavoidable must be encountered, if not with indifference, yet with what courage may be found responsive to the call of the will. So, with all her energy, a larger store than she knew, she braced herself to endure."

George MacDonald

Background photo credit: Giorgi Abdaladze. One of the four endemic species of wheat growing in Georgia.

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"…we live in a universe of marvels of which we know only the outsides,—and which we turn into the incredible by taking the mere outsides for all, even while we know the roots of the seen remain unseen…"

George MacDonald

(From "Warlock o' Glenwarlock," CHAPTER VIII, HOME)

"…the right way is simple to find, though only they that seek it FIRST can find it."

George MacDonald

(From "The Marquis of Lossie," CHAPTER LIII, A NEW PUPIL)

(From "Paul Faber, Surgeon," CHAPTER I, THE LANE)

"...This might indeed at first only render him the more earnest in his denials, but at length it would probably rouse in him that spiritual nature to which alone such questions really belong, and which alone is capable of coping with them."

George MacDonald

"…he seldom laid himself out to answer his objections. He sought rather, but as yet apparently in vain, to cause the roots of those very objections to strike into, and thus disclose to the man himself, the deeper strata of his being..."

(From "Mary Marston," CHAPTER I, THE SHOP)

" 'Everything depends on what a man is in himself…' "

"…common people, whether lords or shopkeepers, are slow to understand that possession, whether in the shape of birth, or lands, or money, or intellect, is a small affair in the difference between men.

George Macdonald

"...As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you—in a book, or a friend, or, best of all in your own thoughts—the eternal thought speaking in your thought.”

George Macdonald

(From "The Marquis of Lossie," CHAPTER XLII, ST RONAN’S WELL)