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The Portent and Other Stories

George MacDonald

196 ratings
The Portent and Other Stories | George MacDonald

The Portent and Other Stories

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This is the story of a daring college student's quest to win the icy heart of a beautiful girl. Unfortunately, the girl is the daughter of a cunning and sadistic master artist, who takes the student as an apprentice with the express intent of torturing the youth with his own hopeless love. The story is set in late 16 century Prague, amid mysterious happenings and the terrifying rumors of a vampire on the loose.
t the writers. Soon she expressed a desire to know something of figures. We commenced arithmetic. I proposed geometry along with it, and found the latter especially fitted to her powers. One by one we included several other necessary branches; and ere long I had four around the schoolroom table—equally my pupils. Whether the attempts previously made to instruct her had been insufficient or misdirected, or whether her intellectual powers had commenced a fresh growth, I could not tell; but I leaned to the latter conclusion, especially after I began to observe that her peculiar remarks had become modified in form, though without losing any of their originality. The unearthliness of her beauty likewise disappeared, a slight colour displacing the almost marbly whiteness of her cheek.

Long before Lady Alice had made this progress, my nightly struggles began to diminish in violence. They had now entirely ceased. The temptation had left me. I felt certain that for weeks she had never walked in her sleep. She was beyond my power, and I was glad of it.

I was, of course, most careful of my behaviour during all this period. I strove to pay Lady Alice no more attention than I paid to the rest of my pupils; and I cannot help thinking that I succeeded. But now and then, in the midst of some instruction I was giving Lady Alice, I caught the eye of Lady Lucy, a sharp, common-minded girl, fixed upon one or the other of us, with an inquisitive vulgar expression, which I did not like. This made me more careful still. I watched my tones, to keep them even, and free from any expression of the feeling of which my heart was full. Sometimes, however, I could not help revealing the gratification I felt when she made some marvellous remark—marvellous, I mean, in relation to her other attainments; such a remark as a child will sometimes make, showing that he has already mastered, through his earnest simplicity, some question that has for ag

Ramón 01/04/2022
So sorry. It's my first book of George Mac Donald and it had been really boring. Sometimes I had been at the point of abandon it.
I wanted to read this author because C.S Lewis
Christine 06/17/2021
Though a slower-paced plot than most of his novels, here MacDonald explores the idea of second sight, or in this novel, second hearing. Young Duncan Campbell can hear the fateful sound of a ghostly horse that ties to the violent past of his family line. I enjoy how MacDonald ties Scottish folklore t
Justin 10/16/2019
I just recently finished reading George MacDonald's novella called The Portent, originally published in 1864. It is a fascinating story about the Celtic second sight, inspired by gothic literature, Scottish highland ghost stories, and it also had a great love story between Alice and Duncan which was
Roger 12/19/2017
The story of a young Scots gentleman of around 1810. He takes a job as a tutor for an English lord while hoping to get a commission in the Scots Grays. He is haunted by occasional flashes of Second Sight, and receives some advice from an old Scotswoman with a good dose of it. A story of how love can
Julia 05/05/2013
Like anything George MacDonald has penned, I deem this a great book. The sole reason being that it has ingrained within the heart of it the soul of a man whose deep respect for duty has only aroused and fed the HONEST, all-consuming, sincere, FLAMING and TRUE loyalty to the love that is of ideal nat
Amanda 06/25/2012
I agree with some other reviewers about the potential of this book. The beginning ghostly tale was so wonderful and I expected it to tie into the story of Duncan and Alice so much more than it did. It really does make me think that MacDonald had planned to do more with it. This story was still very
Bruce 01/11/2010
I am a fan of George MacDonald, and would like to read all his works. This was not one of his strongest novels, and the reasons are structural. In the early chapters, the narrator/protagonist is introduced to a ghostly tale of love and revenge which seems to bear mysteriously on his own fate, but th

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