[Gutenberg 8902] • The Flight of the Shadow

"Though it gives the appearance of starting out as a 'realistic' novel in the tradition of his many others, 'The Flight of the Shadow' soon becomes dark and ominous...." (Michael Phillips)

"In [The Flight of the Shadow]... Dr. MacDonald is bound even less than usual by the commonplace of conventional life, and in it are to be found some of the most strikingly imaginative and mystical of his nature pictures, and symbolisms, as where he describes the horizon looking like a 'void between a cataclysm and the moving afresh of the Spirit of God upon the face of the waters.'

"Later... the sight of a rider on a white horse, dimly seen in a storm, awakes the thought of 'Death returning home on the eve of the great dawn, worn with his age-long work, pleased that it was over, and no more need of him.'

"It is with a kind of chastened pity that the flower-like heroine of this book speaks of those who 'are afraid of loneliness, and hate God's lovely dark.'

"These are the same souls who shrink from the idea of death; yet, says Dr. MacDonald, 'no one can be living a true life to whom dying is a terror' [from 'What's Mine's Mine']." (Katherine Weller, 'A Modern Mystic: George MacDonald')