| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: contrast with the long row of faces crimson with cold, in the midst of
which sat this family group. Further away, an old woman, pale and
rigid, had the repulsive look of rebellious pauperism, eager to avenge
all its past woes in one day of violence.
There, again, was the young workman, weakly and indolent, whose
brightly intelligent eye revealed fine faculties crushed by necessity
struggled with in vain, saying nothing of his sufferings, and nearly
dead for lack of an opportunity to squeeze between the bars of the
vast stews where the wretched swim round and round and devour each
other.
The majority were women; their husbands, gone to their work, left it
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare: And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell:
For being both to me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:
The truth I shall not know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
III.
Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye,
'Gainst whom the world could not hold argument.
Persuade my heart to this false perjury?
Vows for thee broke deserve not punishment.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: out, he roused himself to gibe it into life.
"Well, Mr. Howth, what will you have? If the trodden rights of
the human soul are the slime of yesterday, how shall we found our
empire to last? On despotism? Civil or theocratic?"
"Any despotism is better than that of newly enfranchised serfs,"
replied the school-master.
The Doctor laughed.
"What a successful politician you would have made? You would
have had such a winning way to the hearts of the great unwashed!"
Mrs. Howth laid down her knitting.
"My dear," she said, timidly, "I think that is treason."
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
