| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: inanimate performance of the dancers. When the people sang for us
in Anaho, they must apologise for the smallness of their repertory.
They were only young folk present, they said, and it was only the
old that knew the songs. The whole body of Marquesan poetry and
music was being suffered to die out with a single dispirited
generation. The full import is apparent only to one acquainted
with other Polynesian races; who knows how the Samoan coins a fresh
song for every trifling incident, or who has heard (on Penrhyn, for
instance) a band of little stripling maids from eight to twelve
keep up their minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch, one song
following another without pause. In like manner, the Marquesan,
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Barlaam and Ioasaph by St. John of Damascus: wrathfully persecuted, and I wot not whether any of this sort be
in this country side." Thereat the prince was overwhelmed with
woe, and grievously wounded in spirit. He was like unto a man
that hath lost a great treasure, whose whole heart is occupied in
seeking after it. Thenceforth he lived in perpetual conflict and
distress of mind, and all the pleasures and delights of this
world were in his eyes an abomination and a curse. While the
youth was in this way, and his soul was crying out to discover
that which is good, the eye that beholdeth all things looked upon
him, and he that willeth that `all men should be saved, and come
to the knowledge of the truth,' passed him not by, but showed
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: He was still looking down from his window upon these things, when a
band of men with torches, ladders, axes, and many kinds of weapons,
poured into the yard, and hammering at his door, inquired if there
were any prisoner within. He left the window when he saw them
coming, and drew back into the remotest corner of the cell; but
although he returned them no answer, they had a fancy that some one
was inside, for they presently set ladders against it, and began to
tear away the bars at the casement; not only that, indeed, but with
pickaxes to hew down the very stones in the wall.
As soon as they had made a breach at the window, large enough for
the admission of a man's head, one of them thrust in a torch and
Barnaby Rudge |
