| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: where men sleep nightly in their grave-clothes, and, like phantoms,
communicate by signs.
At supper we talked politics. I make it my business, when I am in
France, to preach political good-will and moderation, and to dwell
on the example of Poland, much as some alarmists in England dwell
on the example of Carthage. The priest and the commandant assured
me of their sympathy with all I said, and made a heavy sighing over
the bitterness of contemporary feeling.
'Why, you cannot say anything to a man with which he does not
absolutely agree,' said I, 'but he flies up at you in a temper.'
They both declared that such a state of things was antichristian.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Caesar's Commentaries in Latin by Julius Caesar: Iuram, qui fines Sequanorum ab Helvetiis dividit, milia passuum XVIIII
murum in altitudinem pedum sedecim fossamque perducit. Eo opere perfecto
praesidia disponit, castella communit, quo facilius, si se invito transire
conentur, prohibere possit. Ubi ea dies quam constituerat cum legatis
venit et legati ad eum reverterunt, negat se more et exemplo populi Romani
posse iter ulli per provinciam dare et, si vim lacere conentur,
prohibiturum ostendit. Helvetii ea spe deiecti navibus iunctis ratibusque
compluribus factis, alii vadis Rhodani, qua minima altitudo fluminis erat,
non numquam interdiu, saepius noctu si perrumpere possent conati, operis
munitione et militum concursu et telis repulsi, hoc conatu destiterunt.
Relinquebatur una per Sequanos via, qua Sequanis invitis propter
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: clingingly affectionate creature as a snake!"
"Not like snakes!" I exclaimed. "Is such a thing possible?"
"No, he doesn't like them," she repeated with a pretty mock-gravity.
"He's not afraid of them, you know. But he doesn't like them.
He says they're too waggly!"
I was more startled than I liked to show. There was something so
uncanny in this echo of the very words I had so lately heard from that
little forest-sprite, that it was only by a great effort I succeeded in
saying, carelessly, "Let us banish so unpleasant a topic. Won't you
sing us something, Lady Muriel? I know you do sing without music."
"The only songs I know--without music--are desperately sentimental,
Sylvie and Bruno |
