At the Back of the North Wind

By George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

The Scottish author’s literary masterpiece—the fantastical story of a young boy’s adventures with a woman of supernatural powers.

Historically, At the Back of the North Wind ranks as George MacDonald’s most well-known and enduring book, the haunting tale of little Diamond, a simple London cabman’s son and his dreamy encounters with the mysterious, wise, powerful, comforting, and occasionally frightening lady known as North Wind. Their eerie nighttime adventures have captivated readers old and young ever since the book’s publication in 1871. It has been published in more editions than any of MacDonald’s works, and ranks as one of the few (perhaps only) title of MacDonald’s that has likely never been out of print. Its skillfully woven intermingling of realism and fantasy set MacDonald apart as a writer of uniqueness and distinction in the early 1870s as his reputation widened. This edition for The Cullen Collection is unedited in any way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780795351877

George MacDonald

George MacDonald (1824 – 1905) was a Scottish-born novelist and poet. He grew up in a religious home influenced by various sects of Christianity. He attended University of Aberdeen, where he graduated with a degree in chemistry and physics. After experiencing a crisis of faith, he began theological training and became minister of Trinity Congregational Church. Later, he gained success as a writer penning fantasy tales such as Lilith, The Light Princess and At the Back of the North Wind. MacDonald became a well-known lecturer and mentor to various creatives including Lewis Carroll who famously wrote, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland fame.

Book preview

At the Back of the

North Wind

The Cullen Collection

George MacDonald

Introductory material © by Michael Phillips

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2018 by RosettaBooks

ISBN (Kindle): 978-0-7953-5187-7

www.RosettaBooks.com

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

New editions of George MacDonald’s classic fiction works updated and introduced by Michael Phillips

The Cullen Collection of the

Fiction of George MacDonald

1. Phantastes (1858)

2. David Elginbrod (1863)

3. The Portent (1864)

4. Adela Cathcart (1864)

5. Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865)

6. Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867)

7. Robert Falconer (1868)

8. Guild Court (1868)

9. The Seaboard Parish (1868)

10. At the Back of the North Wind (1871)

11. Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871)

12. The Princess and the Goblin (1872)

13. Wilfrid Cumbermede (1872)

14. The Vicar’s Daughter (1872)

15. Gutta Percha Willie (1873)

16. Malcolm (1875)

17. The Wise Woman (1875)

18. St. George and St. Michael (1876)

19. Thomas Wingfold Curate (1876)

20. The Marquis of Lossie (1877)

21. Paul Faber Surgeon (1879)

22. Sir Gibbie (1879)

23. Mary Marston (1881)

24. Castle Warlock (1881)

25. The Princess and Curdie (1882)

26. Weighed and Wanting (1882)

27. Donal Grant (1883)

28. What’s Mine’s Mine (1886)

29. Home Again (1887)

30. The Elect Lady (1888)

31. A Rough Shaking (1890)

32. There and Back (1891)

33. The Flight of the Shadow (1891)

34. Heather and Snow (1893)

35. Lilith (1895)

36. Salted With Fire (1897)

37. Far Above Rubies (1898)

The introductions to the 37 volumes form a continuous picture of George MacDonald’s literary life, viewed through the prism of the development of his written legacy of works. While each book can of course be read on its own, every introduction picks up where that to the previous volume left off, with special attention to the title under consideration. The introductions together, as a biography of MacDonald’s life as a writer, are compiled in Volume 38.

38. George MacDonald A Writer’s Life

CONTENTS

Foreword to The Cullen Collection

Introduction to At the Back of the North Wind

1. The Hay-Loft

2. The Lawn

3. Old Diamond

4. North Wind

5. The Summer-House

6. Out In The Storm

7. The Cathedral

8. The East Window

9. How Diamond Got To The Back Of The North Wind

10. At The Back Of The North Wind

11. How Diamond Got Home Again

12. Who Met Diamond At Sandwich

13. The Seaside

14. Old Diamond

15. The Mews

16. Diamond Makes A Beginning

17. Diamond Goes On

18. The Drunken Cabman

19. Diamond's Friends

20. Diamond Learns To Read

21. Sal's Nanny

22. Mr. Raymond's Riddle

23. The Early Bird

24. Another Early Bird

25. Diamond's Dream

26. Diamond Takes a Fare The Wrong Way Right

27. The Children's Hospital

28. Little Daylight

29. Ruby

30. Nanny's Dream

31. The North Wind Doth Blow

32. Diamond And Ruby

33. The Prospect Brightens

34. In The Country

35. I Make Diamond's Acquaintance

36. Diamond Questions North Wind

37. Once More

38. At The Back Of The North Wind

"Papa seems so quietly happy."

—Louisa MacDonald, May 4, 1872, from Deskford (near Cullen)

"Papa does enjoy this place so much."

—Louisa MacDonald, May 6, 1872 from the Seafield Arms Hotel, Cullen

"Papa oh! so jolly & bright & happy…Papa was taken for Lord Seafield yesterday."

—Louisa MacDonald, Sept. 2, 1873, from Cullen

"Papa is very poorly. He ought to go to Cullen for a week think."

—Louisa MacDonald, October 5, 1873, from London

FOREWORD

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

The series name for these works of Scotsman George MacDonald (1824-1905) has its origins in the 1830s when the boy MacDonald formed what would be a lifelong affection for the northeast Scottish village of Cullen.

The ocean became young George’s delight. At the age of eleven, writing from Portsoy or Cullen, he announced to his father his intention to go to sea as a sailor—in his words, as soon as possible. The broad white beach of Cullen Bay, the Seatown, the grounds of Cullen House, the temple of Psyche (Temple of the Winds), Cullen Burn, the dwellings along Grant Street, Scarnose, and especially Findlater Castle, all seized the youth’s imagination with a love that never left him. MacDonald continued to visit Huntly and Cullen throughout his life, using his childhood love for his homeland as the backdrop for his richest novels, including what is arguably his greatest work of fiction, Malcolm, published in 1875.

We therefore honor MacDonald’s unique relationship to Cullen with these newly updated editions of his novels. In Cullen, in certain respects more than in any other place, one finds the transcendent spirit of George MacDonald’s life and the ongoing legacy of his work still magically alive after a century and a half. This release of The Cullen Collection of the Fiction of George MacDonald coincides with a memorial bench and plaque established on Cullen’s Castle Hill commemorating MacDonald’s visits to the region.

This series of new editions is an outgrowth and expansion of my series of edited MacDonald novels published by Bethany House in the 1980s. It includes many more titles and follows the same general priority of creating more readable editions that faithfully preserve the spirit, style, and flavor of MacDonald’s originals. Six of these newly added titles, which would more accurately be termed fantasy, have not, however, been edited, updated, or altered in any way. They are faithful reproductions of the originals exactly as first published. These six—Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, The Princess and Curdie, and Lilith—have been published literally in hundreds of editions through the years, and are thus reproduced for The Cullen Collection with the same text by which they are generally known. *

Dedicated followers of all great men and women continually seek hints that reveal their inner being—the true man, the true woman. What were they really like? What made him or her tick? Many biographies and studies attempt to answer such questions. In George MacDonald’s case, however, a panorama of windows exists that reveals far more about his person than the sum-total of everything that has been written about him over the years. Those are the novels that encompass his life’s work. The volumes of this series represent the true spiritual biography of the man, a far more important biography than life’s details can ever tell.

In 1911, six years after his father’s death, George MacDonald’s son Ronald wrote of the man with whom he had spent his life:

The ideals of his didactic novels were the motive of his own life…a life of literal, and, which is more, imaginative consistency with his doctrine…There has probably never been a writer whose work was a better expression of his personal character. This I am not engaged to prove; but I very positively assert…that in his novels…and allegories…one encounters...the same rich imagination, the same generous lover of God and man, the same consistent practiser of his own preaching, the same tender charity to the sinner with the same uncompromising hostility to the sin, which were known in daily use and by his own people counted upon more surely than sunshine. *

Thirty years after the publication of my one-volume biography George MacDonald Scotland’s Beloved Storyteller, it now gives me great pleasure to present this thirty-seven-volume biography of the man, the Scotsman, the prophetic spiritual voice who is George MacDonald.

How fitting is the original title in which Ronald MacDonald’s sketch of his father quoted above first appeared, From A Northern Window. For any attempted portrait of the man George MacDonald becomes at once a window into his homeland as well.

Therefore, I invite you to gaze back in time through the northern windows of these volumes. Picture yourself perhaps near the cheerful hearth described in the opening pages of What’s Mine’s Mine, looking out the window to the cold seas and mountains in the distance, where perhaps you get a fleeting glimpse of highlanders Ian and Alister Macruadh.

Or imagine yourself walking up Duke Street in Huntly from MacDonald’s birth home, following in the footsteps of fictional Robert Falconer to the town square.

Or envision yourself on some windswept highland moor with Gibbie or Cosmo Warlock.

Or walk up the circular staircase of Fyvie Castle to Donal Grant’s tiny tower hideaway where he began to unravel the mysteries of that ancient and spooky place.

Or walk from Cullen’s Seatown alongside Malcolm selling the fish in his creel, turning at the Market Cross into Grant Street and continuing past Miss Horn’s house and up the hill to the entrance of the Cullen House grounds.

Or perhaps climb Castle Hill to the George MacDonald memorial bench and gaze across the sweep of Cullen Bay to Scarnose as Malcolm’s story comes to life before your eyes.

From any of these settings, whether real or imaginary, drift back through the years and gaze through the panoramic windows of these stories, and take in with pleasure the drama, relationships, images, characters, settings, and spiritual truths George MacDonald offers us as we are drawn into his world. *

Michael Phillips

Cullen, Morayshire

Scotland, 2017

INTRODUCTION

Mystical Tale For the Ages

The development of George MacDonald’s writing life and the evolution of his corpus of works were directly linked to the reading tastes of Victorian Britain. Both his adult realistic novels and his so-called children’s, or what we might today call young reader stories were driven by the public demands of the times. This literary appetite was fed as much by mass-produced weeklies and monthlies as by the publication of quality clothbound books. *

No title so visibly links the name of George MacDonald to nineteenth-century children’s literature more than his classic At the Back of the North Wind.

Literary magazines were hugely popular in Victorian Britain. An enormous variety was published for every reading taste. Among the most popular were those for children, lavishly illustrated and featuring stories, poems, and articles by some of the leading authors of the day. Nor were these publications for mere entertainment. They were seen also as teaching vehicles—instilling spiritual training, respect, family values, history, geography, morality. An entire curriculum, so to speak, of behavior, good choices, mentors and role models, citizenship and spirituality could be found in these magazines and the books that grew out of them. Indeed, there was so much emphasis on teaching stories for children, with clear moral purpose, that even now, over a hundred years later, thrift shops and used bookstores in Scotland literally abound with such books selling for a pound or two—nicely bound, lavishly illustrated.

One of Judy’s unofficial hobbies when we are in Scotland is scouring such shops for old Sunday School prize books, many of which are interestingly inscribed, and which emerged out of this era when spiritual, moral, and behavioral values were imbued into children by the literature of the day. How sadly different is the horrible fare of today’s books for young readers—with predictable cultural and spiritual results.

Britain’s foremost magazine publisher, whom we have already met in the introductions to earlier titles in The Cullen Collection, was Alexander Strahan. He and MacDonald, both Scots, were by now close friends. Not only did Strahan publish eight of MacDonald’s books through his own company, he played an influential role in the publication of a number of additional titles through his associations and relationships with other well-known houses in the publishing industry.

Though he loved children’s literature and fairy tales, Strahan believed so greatly in MacDonald that, in addition to children’s stories, he also published his poetry and sermons (The Disciple and Other Poems, Unspoken Sermons, both in 1867, followed by The Miracles of Our Lord three years later). Alexander Strahan was a man who loved quality and artistry in literary publishing, to such an extent, in fact, that his many magazine ventures continually ran in the red and were not financially able to sustain themselves at the high level of excellence he envisioned for them. He continually had to borrow to keep his magazines going, yet was unable to prevent himself from expanding and widening his horizons yet further.

In 1868, Strahan branched out again with the launch of another new periodical, this time as a spin-off from Good Words specifically for children. He called his new publication Good Words for the Young, and brought the highly reputed Norman MacLeod (though ailing, and more as a figurehead) over from Good Words as its first editor. With Good Words then at the height of its worldwide popularity, it seemed that the new venture could hardly fail to be a hit, which it was.

But sales and circulation do not always tell the whole story. In the midst of Strahan’s success, undercurrents were at work that would eventually doom his empire. He had to borrow heavily to launch the new magazine. And by this time investors he had talked into his prior schemes were getting restless for payment, as were paper suppliers and printers. Thus he had to find new sources to borrow from, new investors, bringing partners into his company and selling stock in it, putting up future profits and copyrights as collateral. With four magazines now going—and successfully, printing hundreds of thousands of copies every month—the bills piled up relentlessly. People wanted to be paid. At the same time he was publishing books—lots of them.

As successful as Strahan was, Strahan and Co. was getting a reputation for pushing finances to the extreme. If MacDonald juggled writing projects, Alexander Strahan was a juggler of money and debt—a far more dangerous game. There is no question that he was good at it. But debt always comes calling.

To keep his publications at a high level and sales strong, Strahan continued seeking top authors and paid them handsomely. This gave his magazines and his lineup of books the illusion of prosperity and health, but only widened the fissures in the undercapitalized financial foundation of his publishing empire.

Strahan’s biographer Patricia Srebrnik explains:

Strahan and Company thrived in the 1860s, or so it must have seemed to observers unaware of yet another personal handicap of Strahan’s: his extremely poor business judgment, a fault closely connected to the unbridled enthusiasm that he brought to every publishing project. Although Strahan spent lavishly on payments to authors and on advertisements, he was usually deeply in debt to the firms which printed and supplied the paper for his publications. At various times Strahan’s long-suffering creditors insisted on taking part in the management of his company. ¹

After the rush of books MacDonald had written and seen into publication during the years 1867-68, no new books were released in 1869. But with his 1868 publications all in production, MacDonald spent the latter months of 1868 writing what would prove to become his best-selling book over the next century and a half, though he would not have guessed it at the time. It was, in fact, his inaugural effort for Strahan’s new magazine—At the Back of the North Wind. Whether the story was completed or not by year’s end, it was far enough along to begin serialization in November of 1868. MacDonald’s eerily unique story no doubt went a long way to get Strahan’s children’s publication successfully off the ground.

The following year, in the fall of 1869, with North Wind running through October, Alexander’s Strahan offered MacDonald the editorship of Good Words for the Young, replacing Norman MacLeod, at the staggering salary of £600 a year. * MacDonald accepted it eagerly and took over almost immediately in November of 1869. For the moment it appeared that his financial difficulties were a thing of the past. That would not turn out to be the case, but MacDonald’s enthusiasm, even if briefly, ran high. The responsibilities of the magazine obviously took time away from his writing, though provided much needed income. And with Good Words for the Young as a ready vehicle for his own fiction, MacDonald’s writing for young people continued at a brisk pace.

MacDonald edited the fledgling magazine for three years. Through his magazine, as he had been so influential in other ways in MacDonald’s career, Alexander Strahan was also now instrumental in bringing to the world some of MacDonald’s most enduring tales, written in the guise of stories for young people, but universal in their appeal. Would these stories have been written otherwise, without the readership of Good Words for the Young eagerly waiting for new offerings from its famous editor? It is a fascinating question to ponder. But the fact is, in the years following MacDonald’s assumption of its editorship, along with numerous short stories and poems, six of MacDonald’s enduring classics made their first appearance in the magazine, and its successor spin-off publications.

Whether or not the inauguration of the magazine and his editorship prompted MacDonald to turn more of his attention toward writing for young people, it was a development that would figure prominently in his future. Following North Wind, this resulted in Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood, The Princess and the Goblin, The History of Gutta-Percha Willie, The Wise Woman, and The Princess and Curdie.

In the meantime, the MacDonald’s new home on the outskirts of London called The Retreat was not working out as well as they had hoped. So near the river, it was constantly damp, the muddy Thames was smelly, and the air from the stench proved unhealthy. Therefore, they leased Halloway House on the south coast in Hastings, keeping The Retreat as a London base, especially for those times when MacDonald needed to be in London for the magazine. For the next few years, he and Louisa and the children split their time between the two homes—a development that obviously increased the demand on their finances even as MacDonald was bringing in far more income than he had probably ever dreamed of.

By the time of this move, the story that became MacDonald’s most enduring classic for almost a century and a half was ready for release in book form. At the Back of the North Wind was published by Alexander Strahan, still managing to keep his plates spinning, in the closing days of 1870 or early in 1871. (As an interesting sidebar, in the same way that Good Words for the Young gave MacDonald the opportunity to expand his fairy tale and children’s writings, the books that resulted themselves became vehicles, as Adela Cathcart before them, for spin-off imaginative expression. North Wind, in particular, is full of children’s poetry, so to speak, and represents the first appearance of Little Daylight, which became one of his best known short stories, and appeared that same year in the ten-volume set Works of Fancy and Imagination.)

Two recurring themes reappear from Phantastes as foundational to North Wind’s story—the dream motif, and the all-wise woman-figure. MacDonald will return to both again and again. Now, however, the series of enigmatic mystical episodes of Anodos’s adventures (whose ultimate meaning remains obscure) is scaled down into a so-called children’s story, and is thus far easier to read and understand (though the flavor of mysticism remains).

MacDonald’s wise women (in their cottages and garrets, with their mirrors and spinning wheels and fires of rose petals and flights over London) are curiously all-wise yet less than all-knowing. They are not drawn as direct portrayals of God, but more as fairy-angels who see and speak high truth and are commissioned (whether commissioned specifically by God depends on how much Christian interpretation one reads into the stories) to help their human charges (Anodos, Diamond, Curdie, Princess Rosamond) in various ways. There are clear limits to what these wise fairy-angel women know and can do.

It is their curious blend between the angelic and human that makes these creations of MacDonald’s so fascinating. They are clearly not Aslan-esque. They embody no direct Christ-parallel. To a Christian reader they speak in ways like God sometimes does. Yet the vague and mystical tone allows for a wider breadth of interpretation, which explains why MacDonald is no less beloved by those who do not necessarily imbue his fairy and fantasy stories with Christian themes and symbolism. North Wind is perhaps the most mysterious of all these good women fairy-angels.

Rolland Hein writes:

"Among his imaginative writings, MacDonald’s most artistically successful handling of the problem of pain occurs in his book for children, At the Back of the North Wind, in which he intermingles fantastic or dream episodes with more realistic ones. He succeeds in creating symbols, metaphors, and poetic statements to present a compelling vision of and a paradoxical relation of chaos and order at the heart of reality and of a fusion of the supernatural with the natural. The story concerns a London cabman’s sickly son who, in dreams occurring during periods of delirium, is visited by the North Wind, a beautiful woman of supernatural powers…Carrying him with her wrapped in her long and lovely hair, she takes him along on her providential errands…

A portion of the appeal of the story lies in its tone, which is affirmative but not dogmatic. The North Wind herself is not all knowing. She exercises faith that the errands she executes—for instance, she sinks a ship, resulting in the loss of lives and fortunes—will ultimately issue in a great good that all can affirm. ²

Through the years, all MacDonald’s biographers have sought in their own way to identify the uniqueness and strange enduring appeal of this compelling book.

Greville says:

"All the strength of its teaching is allusive—an appeal to the imaginative seeing of a truth rather than a claim for its passive acceptance…Who, for instance, can logically accept the doctrine that, God having made the whole world, he being moreover all powerful and all good, everything in the world must be good, however much…appearances deny the claim?" ³

Robert Lee Wolff notes:

"Of all MacDonald's works, At the Back of the North Wind has remained the best-known, delighting and disturbing generation after generation of children. It takes place in two worlds, the real world of everyday Victorian London, and the dream-world of the imagination of Diamond, the coachman's son…With equal matter-of-factness, and no change of pace, MacDonald narrates the events that take place in both worlds; so that the dream world seems a natural extension of the real world…We are not here dealing with an explicit transfer from the world of reality to the world of dreams, as in Phantastes or the Alice books, which are purely dream narratives. For adults, At the Back of the North Wind is like Hoffmann's Golden Pot: as if falling asleep, almost without warning, we pass from one world to the other, and at times the two worlds are fused. No doubt this is one of the reasons why the book gives children the shivers." ⁴

Greville adds further:

"True feeding of the child is more subtle a thing than psychologist can fathom. George MacDonald did fathom it—and in a way that was absolutely matchless. Magic and mystery, nonsense and fun—in no egregious fashions of the day, but in enduring forms of beauty…North Wind is full of light, always renewing itself to this day." ⁵

And Greville’s brother Ronald writes:

"At The Back of the North Wind …seems to stand, in its mystery and simplicity…far above its fellows. Here, for child and man alike, George MacDonald gives us the two worlds co-existent; not here and there, but both here and now. And its three great persons, North Wind, Diamond the boy, and Diamond the cab-horse, speak more wisdom than will ever be spoken about them." ⁶

In my own George MacDonald Scotland’s Beloved Storyteller, I added my own observations to North Wind’s long litany of praise (and those who have never read the book before may want to skip ahead because I would be loath to spoil the ending for you). I quote from that earlier volume:

"Many have pointed to At the Back of the North Wind as possibly the greatest, because it is the simplest, of all MacDonald's prophetic attempts to unite miracle with imagination. So smoothly do we pass from one world to the other in its pages that before we are through, the two have been fused into one; Diamond's imagination has become real.

"Yet North Wind's statement, as one of God's messengers, about the ship she has to sink strikes something deeper in our hearts than the force of logical, preconceived arguments: ‘I will tell you how I am able to bear it, Diamond: I am always hearing, through every noise, through all the noise I am making myself even, the noise of a far-off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear, is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.’

"Even the book’s imagined narrator furthers the truth that to MacDonald imagination was real with one of the simplest, yet most moving, conclusions MacDonald ever wrote: ‘I walked up to the winding stair, and entered his room. A lovely figure, as white and almost as clear as alabaster, was lying on the bed. I saw at once how it was. They thought he was dead. I knew that he had gone to the back of the north wind.’

"All George MacDonald's writings were consistent, communicating the same essential truth—that in everything God was to be seen. Thus, as his son says, his ‘poetical mysticism…will hold sway over human hopes and spiritual strife long after the logical ecclesiasticism of [others] is forgotten,’ ⁷ because he touched his readers on all levels—especially the subconscious and emotional level of the imagination.

A poet? Yes. A mystic? Yes. But neither a poet nor a mystic (like so many) for whom poetry or mysticism were ends in themselves—rather, a spiritual mystic whose imagination was always pointing to the One who was his life. ⁸

The poetry in North Wind deserves special note. In MacDonald’s realistic novels, the poetry can become tedious. It is often completely out of the flow of the story and incongruous to what are otherwise consistent characterizations. MacDonald was a poet, loved poetry, and thus included poetry in nearly everything he wrote.

In North Wind, however, I find the poetry positively delightful. It is not only consistent with the tone of the story, it perfectly fits Diamond’s character and ways of thinking. It is not only seamlessly interwoven, it becomes a harmonious and integral part of the whole. You rarely feel the narrative interrupted by a poem or song, as in the realistic novels. Narrative and verse flow and blend together as one. The poetry is of the same flavor and music as the narrative. It is a unified imaginative expression. The reason is no doubt because here MacDonald is writing very simple, stream of consciousness, funny, visual, sing-songy, nursery-rhyme-ish, melodious verse exactly as a child might think it up, sometimes without a single mark of punctuation. It exactly fits with the story and Diamond’s character. You feel and smell and hear exactly what the poem intends you to feel and smell and hear. Even the cadence and structure and length (some very long, some a line or two) contribute to MacDonald’s brilliant use of the poetic form to weave subtleties and melodic nuances through his uniquely imaginative symphony.

In that sense, I consider the poetry in North Wind as among MacDonald’s best—not perhaps in sophistication, but by his skill in adapting verse to integrate in smooth and balanced unity with the overall narrative. Perhaps I should say it represents his best use of verse.

And here, as everywhere in MacDonald’s corpus, are foreshadowings of Narnia. Diamond’s sailing north, north, north toward "the