| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: which not all the waters of the Mississippi, mingled as they are
with blood, could extinguish. The present will be looked to by
after coming generations, as the age of anti-slavery literature--
when supply on the gallop could not keep pace with the ever
growing demand--when a picture of a Negro on the cover was a help
to the sale of a book--when conservative lyceums and other
American literary associations began first to select their
orators for distinguished occasions from the ranks of the
previously despised abolitionists. If the anti-slavery movement
shall fail now, it will not be from outward opposition, but from
inward decay. Its auxiliaries are everywhere. Scholars,
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare: flesh; and he must needs go that the devil drives.
COUNTESS.
Is this all your worship's reason?
CLOWN.
Faith, madam, I have other holy reasons, such as they are.
COUNTESS.
May the world know them?
CLOWN.
I have been, madam, a wicked creature, as you and all flesh
and blood are; and, indeed, I do marry that I may repent.
COUNTESS.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: in the rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, was set upon and maltreated by a
party of libertines. "On which his holiness, being much astonished"
(says Henri Estienne), "gave out that the heretics were preparing
ambushes against him." The court at once removed from Paris to Saint-
Germain, and the queen-mother, declaring that she would not abandon
the king her son, went with him.
The accession of Francois II., the period at which Catherine
confidently believed she could get possession of the regal power, was
a moment of cruel disappointment, after the twenty-six years of misery
she had lived through at the court of France. The Guises laid hands on
power with incredible audacity. The Duc de Guise was placed in command
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