| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas: d'angoisse. I ask for it; without it I should be tried in a
court of justice because I did not raise the alarm. Thrust
it into my mouth, my lord, thrust it in."
Grimaud prepared to comply with this request, when the
officer made a sign as if he had something to say.
"Speak," said the duke.
"Now, my lord, do not forget, if any harm happens to me on
your account, that I have a wife and four children."
"Rest assured; put the gag in, Grimaud."
In a second La Ramee was gagged and laid prostrate. Two or
three chairs were thrown down as if there had been a
Twenty Years After |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: that stream, which Zeus when he was in love with Ganymede named Desire,
overflows upon the lover, and some enters into his soul, and some when he
is filled flows out again; and as a breeze or an echo rebounds from the
smooth rocks and returns whence it came, so does the stream of beauty,
passing through the eyes which are the windows of the soul, come back to
the beautiful one; there arriving and quickening the passages of the wings,
watering them and inclining them to grow, and filling the soul of the
beloved also with love. And thus he loves, but he knows not what; he does
not understand and cannot explain his own state; he appears to have caught
the infection of blindness from another; the lover is his mirror in whom he
is beholding himself, but he is not aware of this. When he is with the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft: tremendous gale, so bad that no pilot could reach us to bring us in
on Saturday evening. A record of a sea voyage will be only
interesting to you who love me, but I must give it to you that you
may know what to expect if you ever undertake it; but first, I must
sum it all up by saying that of all horrors, of all physical
miseries, tortures, and distresses, a sea voyage is the greatest . .
. The Liverpool paper this morning, after announcing our arrival
says: "The GREAT WESTERn, notwithstanding she encountered
throughout a series of most severe gales, accomplished the passage
in sixteen days and twelve hours."
To begin at the moment I left New York: I was so absorbed by the
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