George MacDonald

Lilith George MacDonald

I had just finished my studies at Oxford, and was taking a brief holiday from work beforeassuming definitely the management of the estate. My father died when I was yet a child;my mother followed him within a year; and I was nearly as much alone in the world as aman might find himself. I had made little acquaintance with the history of my ancestors. Almost the only thing Iknew concerning them was, that a notable number of them had been given to study. I hadmyself so far inherited the tendency as to devote a good deal of my time, though, I confess, after a somewhat desultory fashion, to the physical sciences. It was chiefly the wonder theywoke that drew me. I was constantly seeing, and on the outlook to see, strange analogies, not only between the facts of different sciences of the same order, or between physical andmetaphysical facts, but between physical hypotheses and suggestions glimmering out of themetaphysical dreams into which I was in the habit of falling. I was at the same time muchgiven to a premature indulgence of the impulse to turn hypothesis into theory. Of mymental peculiarities there is no occasion to say more. The house as well as the family was of some antiquity, but no description of it isnecessary to the understanding of my narrative. It contained a fine library, whose growthbegan before the invention of printing, and had continued to my own time, greatlyinfluenced, of course, by changes of taste and pursuit. Nothing surely can more impressupon a man the transitory nature of possession than his succeeding to an ancient property!Like a moving panorama mine has passed from before many eyes, and is now slowly flittingfrom before my own. The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house and additions toit, had nevertheless, like an encroaching state, absorbed one room after another until itoccupied the greater part of the ground floor. Its chief room was large, and the walls of itwere covered with books almost to the ceiling; the rooms into which it overflowed were ofvarious sizes and shapes, and communicated in modes as various-by doors, by openarches, by short passages, by steps up and steps dow