| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: tasted a little of this heady gas. Do you know, my friends,
that a curious establishment might be founded with rooms of
oxygen, where people whose system is weakened could for a few
hours live a more active life. Fancy parties where the room was
saturated with this heroic fluid, theaters where it should be
kept at high pressure; what passion in the souls of the actors
and spectators! what fire, what enthusiasm! And if, instead of
an assembly only a whole people could be saturated, what activity
in its functions, what a supplement to life it would derive.
From an exhausted nation they might make a great and strong one,
and I know more than one state in old Europe which ought to put
From the Earth to the Moon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: at the fountain of light. When they have attained to this exalted state,
let them marry (something too may be conceded to the animal nature of man):
or live together in holy and innocent friendship. The poet might describe
in eloquent words the nature of such a union; how after many struggles the
true love was found: how the two passed their lives together in the
service of God and man; how their characters were reflected upon one
another, and seemed to grow more like year by year; how they read in one
another's eyes the thoughts, wishes, actions of the other; how they saw
each other in God; how in a figure they grew wings like doves, and were
'ready to fly away together and be at rest.' And lastly, he might tell
how, after a time at no long intervals, first one and then the other fell
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: ardour. But though on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and
though in every case the artist must decide for himself, and
decide afresh and yet afresh for each succeeding work and new
creation; yet one thing may be generally said, that we of the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, breathing as we do
the intellectual atmosphere of our age, are more apt to err
upon the side of realism than to sin in quest of the ideal.
Upon that theory it may be well to watch and correct our own
decisions, always holding back the hand from the least
appearance of irrelevant dexterity, and resolutely fixed to
begin no work that is not philosophical, passionate,
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