| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: Vallet, CHARLES VII, iii. 85, note 1.
(3) Champollion-Figeac, 383, 384-386.
Such tastes, with the coming of years, would doubtless take
the place of many others. We find in Charles's verse much
semi-ironical regret for other days, and resignation to
growing infirmities. He who had been "nourished in the
schools of love," now sees nothing either to please or
displease him. Old age has imprisoned him within doors,
where he means to take his ease, and let younger fellows
bestir themselves in life. He had written (in earlier days,
we may presume) a bright and defiant little poem in praise of
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: historians are ranked not by their power of estimating evidence but
by the goodness of the Greek they write.
I must note also the important influence on literature exercised by
Alexander the Great; for while his travels encouraged the more
accurate research of geography, the very splendour of his
achievements seems to have brought history again into the sphere of
romance. The appearance of all great men in the world is followed
invariably by the rise of that mythopoeic spirit and that tendency
to look for the marvellous, which is so fatal to true historical
criticism. An Alexander, a Napoleon, a Francis of Assisi and a
Mahomet are thought to be outside the limiting conditions of
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: so long and vainly looked for, and that his visage was the
perfect and undeniable similitude of the Great Stone Face. People
were the more ready to believe that this must needs be the fact,
when they beheld the splendid edifice that rose, as if by
enchantment, on the site of his father's old weatherbeaten
farm-house. The exterior was of marble, so dazzlingly white that
it seemed as though the whole structure might melt away in the
sunshine, like those humbler ones which Mr. Gathergold, in his
young play-days, before his fingers were gifted with the touch of
transmutation, had been accustomed to build of snow. It had a
richly ornamented portico, supported by tall pillars, beneath
The Snow Image |
