| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale: My heart was like a beaten child,
But no one ever knew.
Life, you have put me in your debt
And I must serve you long --
But oh, the debt is terrible
That must be paid in song.
Alone
I am alone, in spite of love,
In spite of all I take and give --
In spite of all your tenderness,
Sometimes I am not glad to live.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: the most odious is that which constantly robs the soul of the merit of
its thoughts and deeds. It has to abdicate without having reigned. The
word we are readiest to speak, the feelings we most love to express,
die when we are commanded to utter them.
Ere long the young man ceased to invite his friends, to give parties
or dinners; the house might have been shrouded in crape. A house where
the mistress is a bigot has an atmosphere of its own. The servants,
who are, of course, under her immediate control, are chosen among a
class who call themselves pious, and who have an unmistakable
physiognomy. Just as the jolliest fellow alive, when he joins the
/gendarmerie/, has the countenance of a gendarme, so those who give
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: Two owls are perched near me, and are carrying on a long
conversation that I enjoy as much as any warbling of nightingales.
The gentleman owl says [[musical notes occur here in the printed
text]], and she answers from her tree a little way off,
[[musical notes]], beautifully assenting to and completing her
lord's remark, as becomes a properly constructed German she-owl.
They say the same thing over and over again so emphatically
that I think it must be something nasty about me; but I shall
not let myself be frightened away by the sarcasm of owls.
This is less a garden than a wilderness. No one has lived
in the house, much less in the garden, for twenty-five years,
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
