| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy: solved if we see him not harshly silhouetted
against a blank wall, but suffused with his native
atmosphere, amid his native surroundings. Not
till we understand the main outlines of the Rus-
sian temperament can we realise the individuality
of Tolstoy himself: the personality that made him
lovable, the universality that made him great.
So vast an agglomeration of races as that which
constitutes the Russian empire cannot obviously
be represented by a single type, but it will suffice
for our purposes to note the characteristics of the
 The Forged Coupon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Vailima Prayers & Sabbath Morn by Robert Louis Stevenson: while the Samoans - men, women, and children - trooped in through
all the open doors, some carrying lanterns if the evening were
dark, all moving quietly and dropping with Samoan decorum in a wide
semicircle on the floor beneath a great lamp that hung from the
ceiling. The service began by my son reading a chapter from the
Samoan Bible, Tusitala following with a prayer in English,
sometimes impromptu, but more often from the notes in this little
book, interpolating or changing with the circumstance of the day.
Then came the singing of one or more hymns in the native tongue,
and the recitation in concert of the Lord's Prayer, also in Samoan.
Many of these hymns were set to ancient tunes, very wild and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: "abundance of the heart?" No German can say that; unless, of
course, he was trying to say that someone was altogether too
magnanimous, or too courageous, though even that would not yet be
correct, as "abundance of the heart" is not German, not any more
than "abundance of the house, "abundance of the stove" or
"abundance of the bench" is German. But the mother in the home
and the common man say this: "What fills the heart overflows the
mouth." That is speaking with the proper German tongue of the
kind I have tried for, although unfortunately not always
successfully. The literal Latin is a great barrier to speaking
proper German.
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