Warlock o' Glenwarlock: A Homely RomanceMacDonald, George
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Warlock o' Glenwarlock: A Homely Romance
MacDonald, George
Christian fiction; Highlands (Scotland) -- Fiction
Whan the coo loups ower the mune,
The reid gowd rains intil men’s shune.
I think there must at one time have been a poet in the Glenwarlock
nursery, for there were rimes, and modifications of rimes, floating
about the family, for which nobody could account. Cosmo’s mother
too had been, in a fragmentary way, fond of verse; and although he
could not remember many of her favourite rimes, his father did, and
delighted in saying them over and over to her child--and that long
before he was capable of understanding them. Here is one:
Make not of thy heart a casket,
Opening seldom, quick to close;
But of bread a wide-mouthed basket,
And a cup that overflows.
Here is another:
The gadfly makes the horse run swift:
“Speed,” quoth the gadfly, “is my gift.”
One more, and it shall be the last for the present: They serve as
dim lights on the all but vanished mother, of whom the boy himself
knew so little.
In God alone, the perfect end,
Wilt thou find thyself or friend.
Cosmo’s dream of life was, to live all his days in the house of his
forefathers--or at least and worst, to return to it at last, how
long soever he might have been compelled to be away from it. In his
castle-building, next to that of the fairy-mother-lady, his
fondest fancy was--not the making of a fortune, but the returning
home with one, to make the house of his fathers beautiful, and the
heart of his father glad. About the land he did not think so much
yet: the country was open to him as if it had been all his own.
Still, he had quite a different feeling for that portion which yet
lay within the sorely contracted marches; to have seen any smallest
nook of that sold, would have been like to break his heart. In him
the love of place was in danger of becoming a disease. There was in
it something, I fear, of the nature, if not of the avarice that
grasps, yet of the avarice that clings. He was generous as few in
the matter of money, but then he had had so little--not half enough
to learn to love it! Nor had he the slightest idea of any mode in
which to make it. Most of the methods he had come in contact with,
except that of manual labour, in which work was done and money paid
immediately for it, repelled him, as having elements of the
unhandsome where not the dishonest: he was not yet able to
distinguish between substance and mode in such matters. The only
way in which he ever dreamed of coming into possession of money--it
was another of his favourite castles--was finding in the old house
a room he had never seen or heard of before, and therein a hoard of
riches incredible. Such things had been--why might it not be?
As they walked, his father told him he had been thinking all night
what it would be best to do with him, now that the school was
closed against him; and that he had come to the conclusion to ask
his friend Peter Simon--the wits of the neighbourhood called him
Simon Peter--to take charge of his education.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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