| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Betty by Honore de Balzac: serious study, to be fully understood; while the /Violin-player/, the
/Marriage of the Virgin/, and the /Vision of Ezekiel/ go straight to
the heart through the portal of sight, and make their home there. It
is a pleasure to receive them thus without an effort; if it is not the
highest phase of art, it is the happiest. This fact proves that, in
the begetting of works of art, there is as much chance in the
character of the offspring as there is in a family of children; that
some will be happily graced, born beautiful, and costing their mothers
little suffering, creatures on whom everything smiles, and with whom
everything succeeds; in short, genius, like love, has its fairer
blossoms.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: "From Bonn," cried Prosper, "and we have eaten nothing since morning."
"Oh! as to provisions," said the innkeeper, nodding his head, "people
come to the Red Inn for their wedding feast from thirty miles round.
You shall have a princely meal, a Rhine fish! More, I need not say."
After confiding their weary steeds to the care of the landlord, who
vainly called to his hostler, the two young men entered the public
room of the inn. Thick white clouds exhaled by a numerous company of
smokers prevented them from at first recognizing the persons with whom
they were thrown; but after sitting awhile near the table, with the
patience practised by philosophical travellers who know the inutility
of making a fuss, they distinguished through the vapors of tobacco the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: XXXII - IN MEMORIAM E. H.
I KNEW a silver head was bright beyond compare,
I knew a queen of toil with a crown of silver hair.
Garland of valour and sorrow, of beauty and renown,
Life, that honours the brave, crowned her himself with the crown.
The beauties of youth are frail, but this was a jewel of age.
Life, that delights in the brave, gave it himself for a gage.
Fair was the crown to behold, and beauty its poorest part -
At once the scar of the wound and the order pinned on the heart.
The beauties of man are frail, and the silver lies in the dust,
And the queen that we call to mind sleeps with the brave and the just;
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