| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare: Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch,
Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay:
For misery is trodden on by many,
And being low never reliev'd by any. 708
'Lie quietly, and hear a little more;
Nay, do not struggle, for thou shalt not rise:
To make thee hate the hunting of the boar,
Unlike myself thou hear'st me moralize, 712
Applying this to that, and so to so;
For love can comment upon every woe.
'Where did I leave?' 'No matter where,' quoth he
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: absorbed. And so the example becomes also the deeper theme of discourse.
The true knowledge of things in heaven and earth is based upon enthusiasm
or love of the ideas going before us and ever present to us in this world
and in another; and the true order of speech or writing proceeds
accordingly. Love, again, has three degrees: first, of interested love
corresponding to the conventionalities of rhetoric; secondly, of
disinterested or mad love, fixed on objects of sense, and answering,
perhaps, to poetry; thirdly, of disinterested love directed towards the
unseen, answering to dialectic or the science of the ideas. Lastly, the
art of rhetoric in the lower sense is found to rest on a knowledge of the
natures and characters of men, which Socrates at the commencement of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: shipping and the sailors, till, just after he had passed the bottom
of the High Street, he came opposite to one of the many taverns
which looked out upon the river. In the open bay window sat
merchants and gentlemen, discoursing over their afternoon's draught
of sack; and outside the door was gathered a group of sailors,
listening earnestly to some one who stood in the midst. The boy,
all alive for any sea-news, must needs go up to them, and take his
place among the sailor-lads who were peeping and whispering under
the elbows of the men; and so came in for the following speech,
delivered in a loud bold voice, with a strong Devonshire accent,
and a fair sprinkling of oaths.
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