Joshua M. Casey

“I am always hearing. . . the sound 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.'
'No it wouldn't,' returned Diamond stoutly. 'For they wouldn't hear the music of the far-away song; and if they did, it wouldn't do them any good. You see you and I are not going to be drowned, and so we might enjoy it.'
'But you have never heard the psalm, and you don't know what it is like. Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all the cries. . . . It wouldn't be the song it seems if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves with all the rest.”
― George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind

“That's a poet.'
'I thought you said it was a bo-at.'
'Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?'
'Why, a thing to sail on the water in.'
'Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....'
...
'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.”
― George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind

“How kind you are, North Wind!'
'I am only just. All kindness is but justice. We owe it.”
― George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind

“The church grew very lonely about him, and he began to feel like a child whose mother has forsaken it. Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.”
― George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind