Ten years passed, and again I just touched the orbit of another shining light of literature, George Macdonald. We had left Cornwall and were living in London. My father habitually read to us and encouraged us to read for ourselves some of the plays of Shakespeare. We had just finished the study of Hamlet when we heard that a lecture upon that play was to be given at a Congregational Church in a few days by Dr. George Macdonald the poet and novelist. Years before I had revelled in that writers' beautiful child's book 'At the Back of the North Wind', and I had only just finished 'Phantastes'. So I looked forward eagerly to seeing and hearing the author.

The evening came round, and my parents took me and my elder sister to hear the lecture on Hamlet. I have little recollection of the substance of the lecture, but I have a vivid memory of the lecturer with his leonine head and deep musical voice. I remember, too, that he recited several passages of the play, or rather, he chanted them in quite a plain-song manner which, at the time, I thought somewhat detracted from the dignity, and even from the music of the poetry, and compared unfavourably, to my partial mind, with the way my father spoke the wonderful verse, a way of speech which, by its pauses and stresses brought out the meaning of the passages otherwise often somewhat obscure. Macdonald, I have since been given to understand, advocated the singing method of reciting all poetry worthy of the name, of which, in his opinion, music is a chief constituent.