George MacDonald

Section 4 of Harper's Young People, Volume 1, Issue 5, December 2, 1879.

The History of Photogen and Nycteris A Day and Night Merchant by George MacDonald 1.

Watho There was once a witch who desired to know everything.

But the wiser a witch is, the harder she knocks her head against the wall when she comes to it.

And I do agree that many of the characters speak in McDonald's own voice, and he does tend to use a lot of commas.

Again, I'm not saying that this sentence is like... deeply and wholly uncharacteristic of George MacDonald, I am saying instead, this sentence is over the top even for George MacDonald, is what I'm saying.

It's one thing.

George MacDonald's sentences, especially the narrator's sentences, they have tended to be expansive, to roll one thought... on into the next, to move from a statement to an analogy or a simile or metaphor.

Just think of the sort of similes and metaphors that we've seen him, you know, even like extended similes and metaphors sort of stringing together.

Having a sentence that rolls from one of those things to another has been typical of George MacDonald's narrator so far.

But with sentences like that, it isn't like you need a, you know, a map, a torch and a spool of thread to find your way from one end of the sentence to the other, which you kind of do here.

Right.

I suggest that we, uh, rehearse the present trials we're going through and allow them appropriately to cut us down to size.

George MacDonald in a fine novel titled The Curate's Awakening writes this: "Sometimes a thunderbolt will shoot from a clear sky, and sometimes into the life of a peaceful individual without warning of gathered storm something terrible will fall.

And from that moment, everything is changed." Perhaps you are there or you have been there recently, and everything has changed for you.

You once knew a delight you no longer know.

And so he went into the bookshop and kind of pawed through to see if there was anything interesting because he was, you know, even then quite a reader.

And he saw a book called Fantasties, a fairy romance written by George MacDonald.

Okay.

And...

At this point in his life, he did not yet call himself a Christian.

In fact, he was basically an atheist.

But something about this fantasy novel written by George MacDonald just opened his eyes to a whole other potential realm of reality.

Okay.

I know that even regularity, the regularity of the linoleum pattern, may have its advantages.

Dr. George MacDonald and Robert Falconer says that there is a well-authenticated story of a notorious convict who was reformed by entering, in one of the colonies, a church where the matting along the aisle was of the same pattern as that in the church to which he had gone with his mother as a boy.

Bravo! It is pleasant, extremely pleasant, to find that even monotony has its compensations.

Let me but get to know my two proper and straight-laced friends a little better, and I shall doubtless discover even there a few redeeming features.

The panther crouches, springs suddenly upon its unsuspecting prey, and relies on the advantage of surprise.

Such are the sins of youth.

Alas, as George MacDonald so tersely says, Alas, how easily things go wrong! A sigh too deep or a kiss too long! There follows a mist and a weeping rain, and life is never the same again.

The lion meets you in the open and relies upon his strength.