| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Othello by William Shakespeare: Bond-slaues, and Pagans shall our Statesmen be.
Exeunt.
Scaena Tertia.
Enter Duke, Senators, and Officers.
Duke. There's no composition in this Newes,
That giues them Credite
1.Sen. Indeed, they are disproportioned;
My Letters say, a Hundred and seuen Gallies
Duke. And mine a Hundred fortie
2.Sena. And mine two Hundred:
But though they iumpe not on a iust accompt,
Othello |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: they are gone. Actors and surgeons, like great singers too, like
the executants who by their performance increase the power of
music tenfold, are all the heroes of a moment.
Desplein is a case in proof of this resemblance in the destinies
of such transient genius. His name, yesterday so famous, to-day
almost forgotten, will survive in his special department without
crossing its limits. For must there not be some extraordinary
circumstances to exalt the name of a professor from the history
of Science to the general history of the human race? Had Desplein
that universal command of knowledge which makes a man the living
word, the great figure of his age? Desplein had a godlike eye; he
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: sense and discretion as the excellence and order of the feast of a
day.
Think carefully and bravely over these things, and you will find
them true: having found them so, think also carefully over your own
position in life. I assume that you belong to the middle or upper
classes, and that you would shrink from descending into a lower
sphere. You may fancy you would not: nay, if you are very good,
strong-hearted, and romantic, perhaps you really would not; but it
is not wrong that you should. You have, then, I suppose, good food,
pretty rooms to live in, pretty dresses to wear, power of obtaining
every rational and wholesome pleasure; you are, moreover, probably
|
