Lilith | Page 3

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Lilith was first published in 1895 This etext was compiled and prepared by John Bechard,
an American living in London, England ([email protected])

Lilith
by George MacDonald

I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up
the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the
wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether
admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord,
unknown to me,--to whom the sun was servant,-- who had not gone into society in the
village,--who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond
through the wood, in Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with

gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; their trees grew through it. I
do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to
recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's
cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out,--as
the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never
heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor,--notwithstanding I heard
him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of
their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks.
Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of
labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the
wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,--as of
a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle
thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots
and excrescences embayed.
But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now
while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and recollect myself. It is only after a long and
serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their
cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.
Thoreau: "WALKING."


CHAPTER I
THE LIBRARY
I had just finished my studies at Oxford, and was taking a brief holiday from work before
assuming 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 a
man might find himself.
I had made little acquaintance with the history of my ancestors. Almost the only thing I
knew concerning them was, that a notable number of them had been given to study. I had
myself 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 they woke 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 and metaphysical facts, but between physical hypotheses and
suggestions glimmering out of the metaphysical dreams into which I was in the habit of
falling. I was at the same time much given to a premature indulgence of the impulse to
turn hypothesis into theory. Of my mental