| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas: conqueror and that of the pirate?" said the ancients. The
difference only between the eagle and the vulture, --
serenity or restlessness.
And indeed the sallow physiognomy, the thin and sickly body,
and the prowling ways of the stranger, were the very type of
a suspecting master, or an unquiet thief; and a police
officer would certainly have decided in favour of the latter
supposition, on account of the great care which the
mysterious person evidently took to hide himself.
He was plainly dressed, and apparently unarmed; his arm was
lean but wiry, and his hands dry, but of an aristocratic
The Black Tulip |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: life; and to call to mind a succession of such examples as I have
lately had to wander through, though it has been only in the
reading of them, is to feel encouraged and uplifted and washed in
better moral air.
The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience,
bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves
have been flown for religious ideals. I can do no better than
quote, as to this, some remarks which Sainte-Beuve in his History
of Port-Royal makes on the results of conversion or the state of
grace.
"Even from the purely human point of view," Sainte-Beuve says,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare: His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
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