George MacDonald

“ Mrs Mair had that evening gone once more to the Baillies’ Barn in her husband’s absence; for the words of unbelief he had uttered in the Job-like agony of his soul, had haunted the heart of his spouse, until she too felt as if she could hardly believe in a God. Few know what a poor thing their faith is till the trial comes. And in the weakness consequent on protracted suffering, she had begun to fancy that the loss of Phemy was a punishment upon them for deserting the conventicle. Also the schoolmaster was under an interdict, and that looked like a judgment too! ”

“ Even Lady Florimel, invaded by shrieks, had to bite her lips hard to keep herself from responding with like outcry; for scream will call forth scream, as vibrant string from its neighbour will draw the answering tone.
“Deep calleth unto deep! The wind is blowing on the slain! The Spirit is breathing on the dry bones!” shouted the preacher in an ecstacy. But one who rose from behind Lizzy Findlay, had arrived at another theory regarding the origin of the commotion—and doubtless had a right to her theory, in as much as she was a woman of experience, being no other than Mrs Catanach. ”

“ Lady Florimel did not confess that she had begun to feel her life monotonous, or mention that she had for some time been cultivating the acquaintance of a few of her poor neighbours, and finding their odd ways of life and thought and speech interesting. She had especially taken a liking to Duncan MacPhail, in which, strange to say, Demon, who had hitherto absolutely detested the appearance of any one not attired as a lady or gentleman, heartily shared. She found the old man so unlike anything she had ever heard or read of!—so full of grand notions in such contrast with his poor conditions ”

“ Innocence, devotion to another, health, pleasant labour with an occasional shadow of danger to arouse the energies, leisure, love of reading, a lofty-minded friend, and, above all, a supreme presence, visible to his heart in the meeting of vaulted sky and outspread sea, and felt at moments in any waking wind that cooled his glowing cheek and breathed into him anew of the breath of life, —lapped in such conditions, bathed in such influences, the youth’s heart was swelling like a rose-bud ready to burst into blossom. ”

“ But there was such a fire in her heart that no frost could chill her; such a bright bow in her west, that the sun now rising in the world’s east was but a reflex of its splendour. True, the cloud against which it glowed was very dark with by-gone wrong and suffering, but so much the more brilliant seemed the hope now arching the entrance of the future. ”

“ But I will not let pass the opportunity of reminding them how sadly old-fashioned we of the present hour also look in the eyes of those equally infallible judges who have been in dread procession towards us ever since we began to be—our posterity—judges who perhaps will doubt with a smile whether we even knew what love was, or ever had a dream of the grandeur they are on the point of grasping. ”

“ “That depends on whether a man regards it as his fate, or as the will of a perfect God. Its obscurity is its dread; but if God be light, then death itself must be full of splendour—a splendour probably too keen for our eyes to receive.”
“But there’s the deein’ itsel’: isna that fearsome? It’s that I wad be fleyed at.”
“I don’t see why it should be. It’s the want of a God that makes it dreadful, and you will be greatly to blame, Malcolm, if you haven’t found your God by the time you have to die.” ”

“ Thus all-devouring Death—nay, nay! it is all-sheltering, all-restoring mother Nature, receiving again into her mighty matrix the stuff worn out in the fashioning toil of her wasteful, greedy, and slatternly children. In her genial bosom, the exhausted gathers life, the effete becomes generant, the disintegrate returns to resting and capable form. The rolling oscillating globe dips it for an æon in growing sea, lifts it from the sinking waters of its thousand-year bath to the furnace of the sun, remodels and remoulds, turns ashes into flowers, and divides mephitis into diamonds and breath. ”

“ There is no plainer sign of the need of a God, than the possible fate of love. The celestial Cupido may soar aloft on seraph wings that assert his origin, or fall down on the belly of a snake and creep to hell.
But Malcolm was not of the stuff of which coxcombs are made, and had not begun to think even of the abyss that separated Lady Florimel and himself—an abyss like that between star and star, across which stretches no mediating air—a blank and blind space. He felt her presence only as that of a being to be worshipped, to be heard with rapture, and yet addressed without fear. ”

“ The man who would shudder at the idea of a rough word of the description commonly called swearing, will not even have a twinge of conscience after a whole morning of ill-tempered sullenness, capricious scolding, villainously unfair animadversion, or surly cross-grained treatment generally of wife and children! Such a man will omit neither family worship nor a sneer at his neighbour. He will neither milk his cow on the first day of the week without a Sabbath mask on his face, nor remove it while he waters the milk for his customers. ”

“ He sat down in the mouth of the cave, and looked out on the still, half-waking world of ocean and sky before him—a leaden ocean, and a dull misty sky; and as he gazed, a sadness came stealing over him, and a sense of the endlessness of labour—labour ever returning on itself and making no progress. The mad laird was always lamenting his ignorance of his origin: Malcolm thought he knew whence he came—and yet what was the much good of life? Where was the end to it all? People so seldom got what they desired! To be sure his life was a happy one, or had been—but there was the poor laird! ”

“ The diamonds flashed and sparkled and glowed on a white rather than fair neck, which, being very much uncollared, dazzled Malcolm far more than the jewels. Such a form of enhanced loveliness, reflected for the first time in the pure mirror of a high-toned manhood, may well be to such a youth as that of an angel with whom he has henceforth to wrestle in deadly agony until the final dawn; for lofty condition and gorgeous circumstance, while combining to raise a woman to an ideal height, ill suffice to lift her beyond love, or shield the lowliest man from the arrows of her radiation ”

“ Then the sense of lofty loneliness in the deeps of air, and at the same time of proximity to things aerial—doves and martins, vanes and gilded balls and lightning-conductors, the waves of the sea of wind, breaking on the chimneys for rocks, and the crashing roll of the thunder—is in harmony with the highest spiritual instincts; while the clouds and the stars look, if not nearer, yet more germane, and the moon gazes down on the lonely dweller in uplifted places, as if she had secrets with such. ”