"The Magic is in me!" he kept saying. "The Magic is making me strong! I can feel it! I can feel it!"

It seemed very certain that something was upholding and uplifting him. He sat on the seats in the alcoves, and once or twice he sat down on the grass and several times he paused in the path and leaned on Dickon, but he would not give up until he had gone all round the garden. When he returned to the canopy tree his cheeks were flushed and he looked triumphant.

"I did it! The Magic worked!" he cried. "That is my first scientific discovery.".

"The first moment he set his dew-black eye on Dickon he knew he was not a stranger but a sort of robin without beak or feathers".

science and magic

Colin's theme of 'scientific discovery' in connection with the Magic brings us to an interesting point where the idea of science and magic, which to me sounds unscientific, come together. By science I think Colin means enquiry into how things work but I find the notion of magic as part of science intriguing. He wants to know what is holding him up and he wants a scientific solution but by coining it Magic he is placing it into the world of alchemy and other science/magic ideas.

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy

Alchemy (Arabic: الخيمياء al-kimia), a part of the Occult Tradition, is both a philosophy and a practice with an aim of achieving ultimate wisdom as well as immortality, involving the improvement of the alchemist as well as the making of several substances described as possessing unusual properties.

The best-known goals of the alchemists were the transmutation of common metals into gold (called chrysopoeia) or silver (less well known is plant alchemy, or "spagyric"); the creation of a "panacea", or the elixir of life, a remedy that supposedly would cure all diseases and prolong life indefinitely; and the discovery of a universal solvent.[2

Many early alchemists, such as Zosimos of Panopolis, viewed alchemy as a spiritual discipline, and in the Middle Ages, metaphysical aspects increasingly came to be viewed as the true foundation of the art. Organic and inorganic chemical substances, physical states, and molecular material processes as mere metaphors for spiritual entities, spiritual states and ultimately, transformations.

In this sense, the literal meanings of 'Alchemical Formulas' were a blind, hiding their true spiritual philosophy, which being at odds with the Medieval Christian Church was a necessity that could have otherwise lead them to the "stake and rack" of the Inquisition under charges of heresy

Alchemy (Arabic: الخيمياء al-kimia), a part of the Occult Tradition, is both a philosophy and a practice with an aim of achieving ultimate wisdom as well as immortality

She had come in with the last line of their song and she had stood still listening and looking at them. With the ivy behind her, the sunlight drifting through the trees and dappling her long blue cloak, and her nice fresh face smiling across the greenery she was rather like a softly colored illustration in one of Colin's books. She had wonderful affectionate eyes which seemed to take everything in--all of them, even Ben Weatherstaff and the "creatures" and every flower that was in bloom.

Did anyone get a Mother/Virgin Mary parallel with Susan Sowerby? After the children sing the Doxology she enters in a blue cloak.Her entrance seems so saintly and Mother Mary like.

Did anyone get a Mother/Virgin Mary parallel with Susan Sowerby?

5.16 I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider -- a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet.

5.17 The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature -- of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter -- such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?

You are right about the blue cloak of the queen of heaven, but Susan is no virgin, more a gaian earth mother.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?