| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad: Office let me off the port dues, and as there hap-
pened to be a shipwrecked crew staying in the
Home I had no difficulty in obtaining as many men
as I wanted. But when I inquired if I could see
Captain Ellis for a moment I was told in accents of
pity for my ignorance that our deputy-Neptune
had retired and gone home on a pension about
three weeks after I left the port. So I suppose that
my appointment was the last act, outside the
daily routine, of his official life.
It is strange how on coming ashore I was struck
The Shadow Line |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin: (ch. I. 6) we meet with the words, "I hid not my face from shame."
Seneca remarks (Epist. xi. 5) "that the Roman players hang down
their heads, fix their eyes on the ground and keep them lowered,
but are unable to blush in acting shame." According to Macrobius,
who lived in the filth century (`Saturnalia,' B. vii.
C. 11), "Natural philosophers assert that nature being moved
by shame spreads the blood before herself as a veil, as we
see any one blushing often puts his hands before his face."
Shakspeare makes Marcus (`Titus Andronicus,' act ii, sc. 5) say to
his niece, "Ah! now thou turn'st away thy face for shame."
A lady informs me that she found in the Lock Hospital a girl whom
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: passion, frequently cast the light of his mind on historical
prejudices. Diderot undertook in this direction a book (much too long)
on the era of imperial Rome. If it had not been for the French
Revolution, /criticism/ applied to history might then have prepared
the elements of a good and true history of France, the proofs for
which had long been gathered by the Benedictines. Louis XVI., a just
mind, himself translated the English work in which Walpole endeavored
to explain Richard III.,--a work much talked of in the last century.
Why do personages so celebrated as kings and queens, so important as
the generals of armies, become objects of horror or derision? Half the
world hesitates between the famous song on Marlborough and the history
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