| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: Like Egypt's Memnon, they grow quick with song.
This is another day, and the bold world
Leaps up and grasps its light, and laughs, as leapt
Prometheus up and wrenched the fire from Zeus.
This is another day--are its eyes blurred
With maudlin grief for any wasted past?
A thousand thousand failures shall not daunt!
Let dust clasp dust; death, death--I am alive!
And out of all the dust and death of mine
Old selves I dare to lift a singing heart
And living faith; my spirit dares drink deep
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Kidnapped Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum: cannot visit the children again for another year."
"That is true," answered Santa Claus, almost cheerfully;
"Christmas Eve is past, and for the first time in centuries
I have not visited my children."
"The little ones will be greatly disappointed," murmured the Daemon of
Repentance, almost regretfully; "but that cannot be helped now. Their
grief is likely to make the children selfish and envious and hateful,
and if they come to the Caves of the Daemons today I shall get a
chance to lead some of them to my Cave of Repentance."
"Do you never repent, yourself?" asked Santa Claus, curiously.
"Oh, yes, indeed," answered the Daemon. "I am even now repenting that
A Kidnapped Santa Claus |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: the proud love which lives upon its anguish and dies of it. Such was
Eugenie's love after she had read that dreadful letter. She raised her
eyes to heaven, thinking of the last words uttered by her dying
mother, who, with the prescience of death, had looked into the future
with clear and penetrating eyes: Eugenie, remembering that prophetic
death, that prophetic life, measured with one glance her own destiny.
Nothing was left for her; she could only unfold her wings, stretch
upward to the skies, and live in prayer until the day of her
deliverance.
"My mother was right," she said, weeping. "Suffer--and die!"
XIV
Eugenie Grandet |
