The Princess and the Goblin, by George MacDonald, was recommended to me by C. S. Lewis. It lived up to expectations as a children's story that can be read by someone of any age.#

The sequel, The Princess and Curdie, was particularly good. It had some interesting lessons to it.#

The Light Princess and Other Fairy Tales, by George MacDonald. I picked this book up on the recommendation of C. S. Lewis. It is "just" a collection of interesting fairy tales with a few common themes. They were entertaining and occasionally romantic. One, Shadows was a moral parable, which I enjoyed in the middle of the more fantastic tales.#

In the preface, on interpreting his work, MacDonald writes:#

One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God made there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that though: it is God's things, his emobdied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. [p. x-xi]

In The Light Princess, about a weightless princess, the Prince thinks: "No prince, however, would judge of a princess by weight. The loveliness of her foot he would hardly estimate by the depth of the impression it could make in mud." [p. 32]#