| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: attentive his friends may be to him. Therefore, because it is so
impossible to prolong in a tete-a-tete conversations that are soon
exhausted, the master and mistress of a country-house are apt to say,
calmly, "You will be terribly bored here." It is true that to
understand the delights of country life one must have something to do,
some interests in it; one must know the nature of the work to be done,
and the alternating harmony of toil and pleasure,--eternal symbol of
human life.
When a Parisian has recovered his powers of sleeping, shaken off the
fatigues of his journey, and accustomed himself to country habits, the
hardest period of the day (if he wears thin boots and is neither a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: sentimental impression I think I had yet received, for a child is
somewhat deaf to the sentimental. In the last, a poet, who had
been tragically wrangling with his wife, walked forth on the sea-
beach on a tempestuous night and witnessed the horrors of a wreck.
(8) Different as they are, all these early favourites have a
common note - they have all a touch of the romantic.
Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.
The pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts - the active and
the passive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our
destiny; anon we are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking
wave, and dashed we know not how into the future. Now we are
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer: with older but no less ill-balanced provincial politicians,
may be said to represent Young China. Amid such turmoils as this
we invariably look for, and invariably find, a Third Party.
In my opinion, Dr. Fu-Manchu was one of the leaders of such a party.
Another question often put to me was: Where did the Doctor
hide during the time that he pursued his operations in London?
This is more susceptible of explanation. For a time Nayland
Smith supposed, as I did myself, that the opium den adjacent
to the old Ratcliff Highway was the Chinaman's base of operations;
later we came to believe that the mansion near Windsor was his
hiding-place, and later still, the hulk lying off the downstream flats.
The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu |
