fragments in praise of Hans Andersen written apparently in his
schooldays. In the chapter of _Orthodoxy_ called "The Ethics of
Elfland" he shows how the truth about goodness and happiness came to
him out of the old fairy tales and made the first basis for his
philosophy. And George Macdonald's story _The Princess and the
Goblin_ made, he says, "a difference to my whole existence, which
helped me to see things in a certain way from the start." It is the
story of a house where goblins were in the cellar and a kind of fairy
godmother in a hidden room upstairs. This story had made "all the
ordinary staircases and doors and windows into magical things." It
was the awakening of the sense of wonder and joy in the ordinary
things always to be his. Still more important was the realization
represented by the goblins below stairs, that "When the evil things
besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside but inside." In
life as in this story there is

. . . a house that is our home, that is rightly loved as our home,
but of which we hardly know the best or the worst, and must always
wait for the one and watch against the other. . . . Since I first
read that story some five alternative philosophies of the universe
have come to our colleges out of Germany, blowing through the world
like the east wind. But for me that castle is still standing in the
mountains, its light is not put out.*

[* Introduction to _George Macdonald and His Wife_.]

All this to Gilbert made the story the "most real, the most
realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life" of
any story he ever read--then or later! Another recurrent image in
books by the same author is that of a great white horse. And Gilbert