| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: Cleopatra herself. This was Cyril Graham's theory, evolved as you
see purely from the Sonnets themselves, and depending for its
acceptance not so much on demonstrable proof or formal evidence,
but on a kind of spiritual and artistic sense, by which alone he
claimed could the true meaning of the poems be discerned. I
remember his reading to me that fine sonnet -
How can my Muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O, give thyself the thanks, if aught in me
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: eldest son scourged for protesting against the wrong. And he
returned, at the head of an army of Tatars, Socinians, Greeks, or
what not, to set free the serfs, and exterminate Jesuits, Jews, and
nobles, throughout Podolia, Volhynia, Red Russia; to desecrate the
altars of God, and slay his servants; to destroy the nobles by
lingering tortures; to strip noble ladies and maidens, and hunt them
to death with the whips of his Cossacks; and after defeating the
nobles in battle after battle, to inaugurate an era of misery and
anarchy from which Poland never recovered.
Thus did the masses of Southern Poland discover, for one generation
at least, that they were not many things, but one thing; a class,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: art; though, to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions
are to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk
sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the
requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the
capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It
requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker.
You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator
nascitur, non fit. Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember
and have described to me some walks which they took ten years
ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half
an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have
Walking |
