I loved the poems and the fairy tale within the story.

One of my favorite passages:

"Now the wicked fairies will not be bound by the laws which the good fairies obey, and this always seems to give the bad advantage over the good, for they use means to gain their ends which others will not. But it is all of no consequence, for what they do never succeeds; Nay, in the end it brings about the very thing they are trying to prevent. So you see for all their cleverness, wicked fairies are dreadfully stupid, for, although from the beginning of the world they have really helped instead of thwarting the good fairies, not one of them is a bit wiser for it." -George Macdonald