| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: legs, eight in all, with incredible rapidity. Yet there is a mixture of
earnestness in this jest; three serious principles seem to be insinuated:--
first, that man cannot exist in isolation; he must be reunited if he is to
be perfected: secondly, that love is the mediator and reconciler of poor,
divided human nature: thirdly, that the loves of this world are an
indistinct anticipation of an ideal union which is not yet realized.
The speech of Agathon is conceived in a higher strain, and receives the
real, if half-ironical, approval of Socrates. It is the speech of the
tragic poet and a sort of poem, like tragedy, moving among the gods of
Olympus, and not among the elder or Orphic deities. In the idea of the
antiquity of love he cannot agree; love is not of the olden time, but
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft: The old and the middle-aged are more attended to here than with us,
where the young are all in all. As Hayward said to me the other
evening, "it takes time to make PEOPLE, like cathedrals," and Mr.
Rogers and Miss Berry could not have been what they are now, forty
years ago. A long life of experience in the midst constantly of the
highest and most cultivated circles, and with several generations of
distinguished men gives what can be acquired in no other way. Mr.
Rogers said to me one day: "I have learnt more from men that from
BOOKS, and when I used to be in the society of Fox and other great
men of that period, and they would sometimes say 'I have always
thought so and so,' then I have opened my ears and listened, for I
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner: dog, who are on the side of those who take our lands and our wives and our
daughters before our eyes; tell us where you have hidden him?' And when he
would not answer them, they killed him before the door of the hut. And
when the night came, the white man crept up on his hands and knees, and
came to his hut to look for food. All the other men were gone, but his
servant lay dead before the door; and the white man knew how it must have
happened. He could not creep further, and he lay down before the door, and
that night the white man and the black lay there dead together, side by
side. Both those men were of my friends."
"It was damned plucky of the nigger," said Peter; "but I've heard of their
doing that sort of thing before. Even of a girl who wouldn't tell where
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