| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: to your sympathies, you will call either the bitterness, or the
insight, of a mind which has surrendered its best hopes, and been
foiled in its favourite aims.
I spent the ten strongest years of my life, (from twenty to thirty,)
in endeavouring to show the excellence of the work of the man whom I
believed, and rightly believed, to be the greatest painter of the
schools of England since Reynolds. I had then perfect faith in the
power of every great truth of beauty to prevail ultimately, and take
its right place in usefulness and honour; and I strove to bring the
painter's work into this due place, while the painter was yet alive.
But he knew, better than I, the uselessness of talking about what
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Anabasis by Xenophon: leading role. This occurred between 401 B.C. and
March 399 B.C.
PREPARER'S NOTE
This was typed from Dakyns' series, "The Works of Xenophon," a
four-volume set. The complete list of Xenophon's works (though
there is doubt about some of these) is:
Work Number of books
The Anabasis 7
The Hellenica 7
The Cyropaedia 8
The Memorabilia 4
Anabasis |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: the matter of trees and lakes. While talking exclusively of what they
saw, so that any one might have overheard them, they felt that the
compact between them was made firmer and deeper by the number of
people who passed them and suspected nothing of the kind. The question
of Ralph's cottage and future was not mentioned again.
CHAPTER XXVI
Although the old coaches, with their gay panels and the guard's horn,
and the humors of the box and the vicissitudes of the road, have long
moldered into dust so far as they were matter, and are preserved in
the printed pages of our novelists so far as they partook of the
spirit, a journey to London by express train can still be a very
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