| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: out, and took off his cap to them, and wished them a merry journey
and a safe return; and then gathered up all the feathers which they
had left, and cleaned them to sell down south, and make feather-
beds for stuffy people to lie on.
Then the petrels asked this bird and that whether they would take
Tom to Shiny Wall: but one set was going to Sutherland, and one to
the Shetlands, and one to Norway, and one to Spitzbergen, and one
to Iceland, and one to Greenland: but none would go to Shiny Wall.
So the good-natured petrels said that they would show him part of
the way themselves, but they were only going as far as Jan Mayen's
Land; and after that he must shift for himself.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: {168} cf. "Il." iii. 337 and three other places. It is strange
that the author of the "Iliad" should find a little horse-hair
so alarming. Possibly enough she was merely borrowing a common
form line from some earlier poet--or poetess--for this is a
woman's line rather than a man's.
{169} Or perhaps simply "window." See plan in the appendix.
{170} i.e. the pavement on which Ulysses was standing.
{171} The interpretation of lines 126-143 is most dubious, and
at best we are in a region of melodrama: cf., however, i.425,
etc. from which it appears that there was a tower in the outer
court, and that Telemachus used to sleep in it. The [Greek] I
The Odyssey |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: them, that their genuineness is neither proven nor disproven until further
evidence about them can be adduced. And we are as confident that the
Epistles are spurious, as that the Republic, the Timaeus, and the Laws are
genuine.
On the whole, not a twentieth part of the writings which pass under the
name of Plato, if we exclude the works rejected by the ancients themselves
and two or three other plausible inventions, can be fairly doubted by those
who are willing to allow that a considerable change and growth may have
taken place in his philosophy (see above). That twentieth debatable
portion scarcely in any degree affects our judgment of Plato, either as a
thinker or a writer, and though suggesting some interesting questions to
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