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 motherfollowed him within a year; and I was nearly as much alone in the world as a man might findhimself. I had made little acquaintance with the history of my ancestors. Almost the only thing I knewconcerning them was, that a notable number of them had been given to study. I had myself so farinherited the tendency as to devote a good deal of my time, though, I confess, after a somewhatdesultory fashion, to the physical sciences. It was chiefly the wonder they woke that drew me. I wasconstantly seeing, and on the outlook to see, strange analogies, not only between the facts ofdifferent sciences of the same order, or between physical and metaphysical facts, but betweenphysical hypotheses and suggestions glimmering out of the metaphysical dreams into which I was inthe habit of falling. I was at the same time much given to a premature indulgence of the impulse toturn hypothesis into theory. Of my mental peculiarities there is no occasion to say more. The house as well as the family was of some antiquity, but no description of it is necessary to theunderstanding of my narrative. It contained a fine library, whose growth began before the inventionof printing, and had continued to my own time, greatly influenced, of course, by changes of tasteand pursuit. Nothing surely can more impress upon a man the transitory nature of possession thanhis succeeding to an ancient property! Like a moving panorama mine has passed from before manyeyes, and is now slowly flitting from before my own. The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house and additions to it, hadnevertheless, like an encroaching state, absorbed one room after another until it occupied the greaterpart of the ground floor. Its chief room was large, and the walls of it were covered with booksalmost to the ceiling; the rooms into which it overflowed were of various sizes and shapes, andcommunicated in modes as various-by doors, by open arches, by short passages, by steps up andsteps down.