| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: "Is he in good health, and can he bear it?" said the clerk to the
doctor.
"Yes," replied the latter, who was one of the physicians of the house
of Lorraine.
"In that case, retire to the next room; we will send for you whenever
we require your advice."
The physician left the hall.
His first terror having passed, Christophe rallied his courage; the
hour of his martyrdom had come. Thenceforth he looked with cold
curiosity at the arrangements that were made by the executioner and
his men. After hastily preparing a bed, the two assistants got ready
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. He is in ROMEO
AND JULIET, in the WINTER'S TALE, in Provencal poetry, in the
ANCIENT MARINER, in LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI, and in Chatterton's
BALLAD OF CHARITY.
We owe to him the most diverse things and people. Hugo's LES
MISERABLES, Baudelaire's FLEURS DU MAL, the note of pity in Russian
novels, Verlaine and Verlaine's poems, the stained glass and
tapestries and the quattro-cento work of Burne-Jones and Morris,
belong to him no less than the tower of Giotto, Lancelot and
Guinevere, Tannhauser, the troubled romantic marbles of Michael
Angelo, pointed architecture, and the love of children and flowers
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: more ignorant than any schoolboy of Greek grammar, and had no table of the
inflexions of verbs and nouns before his eyes, which might have suggested
to him the distinction.
(4) Plato distinctly affirms that language is not truth, or 'philosophie
une langue bien faite.' At first, Socrates has delighted himself with
discovering the flux of Heracleitus in language. But he is covertly
satirising the pretence of that or any other age to find philosophy in
words; and he afterwards corrects any erroneous inference which might be
gathered from his experiment. For he finds as many, or almost as many,
words expressive of rest, as he had previously found expressive of motion.
And even if this had been otherwise, who would learn of words when he might
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