George MacDonald

“ But he would not go so far from home again, for, though his father never pined or complained, Cosmo could see that his days shrunk more rapidly when he was not with him: left alone, he began at once to go home the faster—as if another dragging anchor were cast loose, and he was drawn the more swiftly whither sets the tide of life. To the old and weary man the life to come showed as rest; to the young and active Cosmo it promised more work. It is all one; what we need for rest as well as for labour is life ; more life we want, and that is everything. ”

“ In the little council Cosmo represented the rising generation with its new thought, its new consciousness of need, and its new difficulties; and was delighted to find how readily his notions were received, how far from strange they were to his old-fashioned friends, especially his preceptor, and how greatly true wisdom suffices for the hearing and understanding of new cries after the truth. For what all men need is the same—only the look of it changes as its nature expands before the growing soul or the growing generation, whose hunger and thirst at the same time grow with it. ”

“ Because thou art life, I live. Nothing can hurt me, because nothing can hurt thee. To thy care I leave my son, for thou lovest him as thou hast loved me. Deal with him as thou hast dealt with me. I ask for nothing, care for nothing but thy will. Strength is gone from me, but my life is hid in thee. I am a feeble old man, but I am dying into the eternal day of thy strength.”
Cosmo stood and listened with holy awe and growing faith. For what can help our faith like the faith of the one we most love, when, sorely tried, it is yet sound and strong! ”

“ Surely it must be one of those substances that have the power of drinking and hoarding the light of the sun, that with their memories of it they may thin the darkness! I suspect everything does it more or less. Far below were the lights of the castle, and across an unbroken waste of whiteness the gleams of the village. The air was keen as an essence of points and edges, and the thought of the kitchen fire grew pleasant. Cosmo took Joan’s hand, and down the hill they ran, swiftly descending what they had toilsomely climbed. ”

“ In their poverty, partly no doubt from consideration, they seemed to be much forgotten. The family was like an old thistle-head, withering on its wintry stalk, alone in a wind-swept field. All the summer through not a single visitor, friend or stranger, had slept in the house. A fresh face was more of a wonder to Cosmo than to desert-haunting Abraham. The human heart, like the human body, can live without much variety to feed on, but its house is built on a lordly scale for hospitality, and is capable of welcoming every new face as a new revelation. ”

“ There are the hills again every winter, but will the old days ever come again, Cosmo?”
“The old days never come again,” answered Cosmo. “But do you know why, Joan?”
“No,” murmured Joan, very sadly.
“Because they would be getting in the way of the new better days, whose turn it is,” replied Cosmo. “You tell God, Joan, all about it; he will give us better days than those. To some, no doubt, it seems absurd that there should be a great hearing Life in the world; but it is what you and I need so much that we don’t see how, by any possibility, to get on without it! It cannot well look absurd to us! ”

“ I know it is very different—God is so much, much more my father than is the laird of Glenwarlock! He is so much more to me, and so much nearer to me, though my father is the best father that ever lived! God, you know, Joan, God is more than anybody knows what to say about. Sometimes, when I am lying in my bed at night, my heart swells and swells in me, that I hardly know how to bear it, with the thought that here I am, come out of God, and yet not out of him—close to the very life that said to everything be, and it was! ”

“ Cosmo listened, and thereafter restrained himself, having no right to overwork his companions; yet notwithstanding he had cause, many a time in after life, to remember the too great exertion of that day. Even in the matter of work a man has to learn that he is not his own, but has a master, whom he must not serve as if he were a hard one. When our will goes hand in hand with God’s, then are we fellow-workers with him in the affairs of the universe—not mere discoverers of his ways, watching at the outskirts of things, but labourers with him at the heart of them. ”

“ Time no more cures our ills, than space unites our souls, because they cross it to mingle.
Had Cosmo suspected Joan’s thought, he would have spoken; but the urn of the naiad had brought back to him his young thoughts and imaginations concerning the hidden source of the torrent that rushed for ever along the base of Castle Warlock: the dry urn was to him the end of all life that knows not its source—therefore, when the water of its consciousness fails, cannot go back to the changeless, ever renewing life, and unite itself afresh with the self-existent, parent spring. ”

“ The majority of men, whether they think or not, worship solidity and fact: to such Cosmo’s conclusion must seem both foolish and dangerous—though a dream may be filled with truth, and a fact be a mere shred for the winds of the limbo of vanities. Everything that can pass belongs to the same category with the dream. The question is whether the passing body leaves a live soul; whether the dream has been dreamed, the life lived aright. For there is a reality beyond all facts of suns and systems; solidity itself is but the shadow of a divine necessity ”

“ The laird’s thoughts were with his Marion in the region beyond the dream; Cosmo’s with Joan in the dream that had vanished into itself. If love be religion, what matter whether its object be in heaven or on the earth! Love itself is the only true nearness. He who thinks of his Saviour as far away can have made little progress in the need of him; and he who does not need much cannot know much, any more than he who is not forgiven much can love much. ”

“ For a long unweary time Cosmo lay and listened, an aerial Amphion, building castles in the air to its music, which was so monotonous that, like the drone of the bag-pipes, he could use it for accompaniment to any dream-time of his own.
When a man comes to trust in God thoroughly, he shrinks from castle-building, lest his faintest fancy should run counter to that loveliest Will; but a boy’s dreams are nevertheless a part of his education. And the true heart will not leave the blessed conscience out, even in its dreams. ”

“ The laird fell into a gentle monologue, in which, to Joan’s thinking, he talked even more strangely than Cosmo. Things born in the fire and the smoke, like the song of the three holy children, issued from the furnace clothed in softest moonlight. Joan said to herself it was plain where the boy got his oddity; but what she called oddity was but sense from a deeper source than she knew the existence of. He read them also passages of the book then occupying him so much: Joan wondered what attraction such a jumble of good words and no sense could have for a man so capable in ordinary affairs. ”

“ Surely but for that other love that lay patient and hopeless in the depth of Cosmo’s heart, he would now have loved Aggie in a way to satisfy her, and to justify him in saying he loved her! And to that it might have come in time, but where is the use of saying what might have been, when all things are ever moving towards the highest and best for the individual as well as for the universe! —not the less that hell may be the only path to it for some—the hell of an absolute self-loathing. ”

“ Cosmo’s condition had no evil in it—only a ghastly imperfection—an abyssmal lack—an exhaustion at the very roots of being. God seemed away, as he could never be and be God. But every commonest day of his life, he who would be a live child of the living has to fight with the God-denying look of things, and believe that in spite of that look, seeming ever to assert that God has nothing to do with them, God has his own way—the best, the only, the live way, of being in everything, and taking his own pure, saving will in them ”

“ It is a marvel that even world-loving people should never see with what a load they oppress the lives of the children to whom, instead of bringing them up to earn their own living, and thus enjoy at least the game of life, they leave a fortune enough to sink a devil yet deeper in hell. Was it nothing to Cosmo to inherit a long line of ancestors whose story he knew—their virtues, their faults, their wickedness, their humiliation?—to inherit the nobility of a father such as his? ”

“ A man may have a wife who is all the world to him, but must he therefore set her on a throne? Cosmo, essentially and peculiarly practical, never thought of the world and his verses together, but gathered life for himself in the making of them.
These children of his, like all real children, strengthened his heart, and upheld his hands. In them Truth took to him shape; in them she submitted herself to his contemplation. He grew faster, and from the days of his mourning emerged more of a man, and abler to look the world in the face. ”

“ Surely the live God is not absent from the symbol of his glory! The light and the hope are not there without him! When strength wakes in my heart, shall I be the slave to imagine it comes only as the sap rises in the stem of the reviving plant, or the mercury in the tube of the thermometer? that there is no essential life within my conscious life, no spirit within my spirit? If my origin be not life, I am the poorest of slaves!
Cosmo had changed since first he sat behind such horses, on his way to the university ”

“ Cosmo thought none of all this now—it had vanished from his consciousness, but was present in his life—that is, in his action: he did not feel, he did it all—did it even when nothing seemed worth doing.
How much greater a man than he was Jermyn! How much more worthy of the love of a woman like Joan! How good he had been to him! What a horrible thing it would be if Jermyn had saved his life that he might destroy Jermyn’s! Perhaps Joan might have come one day to love him; but in the meantime how miserable she was with her brother, and when could he have delivered her! ”

“ There are souls innumerable in the world, as dry as the Sahara desert—souls which, when they look most gay and summer-like, are only flaunting the flowers gathered from other people’s gardens, stuck without roots into their own unproducing soil. Oh, the dreariness, the sandy sadness of such poor arid souls! They are hungry, and eat husks; they are thirsty, and drink hot wine; their sleep is a stupor, and their life, if not an unrest, then a yielded decay. Only when praised or admired do they feel as if they lived! But Joan was not yet of such. ”

“ Cosmo, my son, don’t you learn to drown your soul in your body, like the poor Duke of Clarence in the wine-butt.”
The material part of us ought to keep growing gradually thinner, to let the soul out when its time comes, and the soul to keep growing bigger and stronger every day, until it bursts the body at length, as a growing nut does its shell; when, instead, the body grows thicker and thicker, lessening the room within, it squeezes the life out of the soul, and when such a man’s body dies, his soul is found a shrivelled thing, too poor to be a comfort to itself or to anybody else. ”

“ I don’t believe it can be a good thing at your age to think so much about religion. There is a time for everything. You talk like one of those good little children in books that always die—at least I have heard of such books—I never saw any of them.”
Cosmo laughed again.
“Which of us is the merrier—you or me? Which of us is the stronger, Joan? The moment I saw you, I thought you looked like one that hadn’t enough of something—as if you weren’t happy; but if you knew that the great beautiful person we call God, was always near you, it would be impossible for you to go on being sad.” ”

“ I do not think Cosmo loved his home too much; I only think he did not love it enough in God. To love a thing divinely, is to be ready to yield it without a pang when God wills it; but to Cosmo, the thought of parting with the house of his fathers and the rag of land that yet remained to it, was torture. This hero of mine, instead of sleeping the perfect sleep of faith, would lie open-eyed through half the night, hatching scheme after scheme—not for the redemption of the property—even to him that seemed hopeless—but for the retention of the house. ”