| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lucile by Owen Meredith: The shadows are many, the sunlight is one.
Life's sorrows still fluctuate: God's love does not.
And His love is unchanged, when it changes our lot.
Looking up to this light, which is common to all,
And down to these shadows, on each side, that fall
In time's silent circle, so various for each,
Is it nothing to know that they never can reach
So far, but what light lies beyond them forever?
Trust to me! Oh, if in this hour I endeavor
To trace the shade creeping across the young life
Which, in prayer till this hour, I have watch'd through its strife
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Heap O' Livin' by Edgar A. Guest: I used to have to go to him 'most every night
and say
The dreadful things that I had done to worry
folks that day.
I know I didn't mean to be a turmoil round the
place,
And with the womenfolks about forever in dis-
grace;
To do the way they said I should, I tried the
best I could,
But though they scolded me a lot -- my father
A Heap O' Livin' |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: still lives. Often, when the flocks of gray clouds, driven in
squadrons athwart the mountains and among the tree-tops, hid the sky
with their triple veils Earth, lacking the celestial lights, lit
herself by herself.
Here, then, we meet the majesty of Cold, seated eternally at the pole
in that regal silence which is the attribute of all absolute monarchy.
Every extreme principle carries with it an appearance of negation and
the symptoms of death; for is not life the struggle of two forces?
Here in this Northern nature nothing lived. One sole power--the
unproductive power of ice--reigned unchallenged. The roar of the open
sea no longer reached the deaf, dumb inlet, where during one short
Seraphita |
