| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare: The one a palate hath that needs will taste,
Though reason weep, and cry It is thy last.
'For further I could say, This man's untrue,
And knew the patterns of his foul beguiling;
Heard where his plants in others' orchards grew,
Saw how deceits were gilded in his smiling;
Knew vows were ever brokers to defiling;
Thought characters and words, merely but art,
And bastards of his foul adulterate heart.
'And long upon these terms I held my city,
Till thus he 'gan besiege me: Gentle maid,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cousin Betty by Honore de Balzac: Vatican are in the highest degree perfect and sublime. But they demand
a stress of attention, even from the most accomplished beholder, and
serious study, to be fully understood; while the /Violin-player/, the
/Marriage of the Virgin/, and the /Vision of Ezekiel/ go straight to
the heart through the portal of sight, and make their home there. It
is a pleasure to receive them thus without an effort; if it is not the
highest phase of art, it is the happiest. This fact proves that, in
the begetting of works of art, there is as much chance in the
character of the offspring as there is in a family of children; that
some will be happily graced, born beautiful, and costing their mothers
little suffering, creatures on whom everything smiles, and with whom
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Book of Remarkable Criminals by H. B. Irving: the otherwise extraordinary guilt of Iago, and would no doubt be
accorded to him as such, were he on trial before a French jury.
The most successful, and therefore perhaps the greatest, criminal
in Shakespeare is King Claudius of Denmark. His murder of his
brother by pouring a deadly poison into his ear while sleeping,
is so skilfully perpetrated as to leave no suspicion of foul
play. But for a supernatural intervention, a contingency against
which no murderer could be expected to have provided, the crime
of Claudius would never have been discovered. Smiling, jovial,
genial as M. Derues or Dr. Palmer, King Claudius might have gone
down to his grave in peace as the bluff hearty man of action,
A Book of Remarkable Criminals |
