| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: If many of them ever come to him.
His memories are like lamps, and they go out;
Or if they burn, they flicker and are dim.
A light of other gleams he has to-day
And adulations of applauding hosts;
A famous danger, but a safer way
Than growing old alone among the ghosts.
But we may still be glad that we were wrong:
He fooled us, and we'd shrivel to deny it;
Though sometimes when old echoes ring too long,
I wish the bells in ~Boris~ would be quiet.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen: recognise East Street again; there is not a single decent shop from one end to
the other! Nothing but wretched huts can I see anywhere; just as if I were at
Ringstead. Ohl I am ill! I can scarcely bear myself any longer. Where the
deuce can the house be? It must be here on this very spot; yet there is not
the slightest idea of resemblance, to such a degree has everything changed
this night! At all events here are some people up and stirring. Oh! oh! I am
certainly very ill."
He now hit upon a half-open door, through a chink of which a faint light
shone. It was a sort of hostelry of those times; a kind of public-house. The
room had some resemblance to the clay-floored halls in Holstein; a pretty
numerous company, consisting of seamen, Copenhagen burghers, and a few
Fairy Tales |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: scarcely a week passed but some popular distinction, some large
imposing generalisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen or
mine. . . .
I was at great pains to give my philosophical, political, and social
matter the best literary and critical backing we could get in
London. I hunted sedulously for good descriptive writing and good
criticism; I was indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider,
if not to accept advice; I watched every corner of the paper, and
had a dozen men alert to get me special matter of the sort that
draws in the unattached reader. The chief danger on the literary
side of a weekly is that it should fall into the hands of some
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