| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phantasmagoria and Other Poems by Lewis Carroll: Enthusiastically;
And thought "There's no hum-drum in him,
Nor any shilly-shally."
"And would you be a poet
Before you've been to school?
Ah, well! I hardly thought you
So absolute a fool.
First learn to be spasmodic -
A very simple rule.
"For first you write a sentence,
And then you chop it small;
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland: for discussion. Most of it was prepared by various temples, each
being celebrated for some particular dish, which it was asked to
provide for the occasion.
It is not uncommon for a Chinese lady to take upon herself a vow
in which she promises the gods to observe certain days of each
month as fast days, on condition that they restore to health a
mother, father, husband or child. No matter what banquet she
attends she need only mention to her hostess that she has a vow
and she is made the chief guest, helping others but eating
nothing herself. After this full month feast the baby was seen,
its presents admired, the last cup of tea drunk, the farewells
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: of the reader. The effect produced by these grandiloquent orations on
Socrates, who does not recover after having heard one of them for three
days and more, is truly Platonic.
Such discourses, if we may form a judgment from the three which are extant
(for the so-called Funeral Oration of Demosthenes is a bad and spurious
imitation of Thucydides and Lysias), conformed to a regular type. They
began with Gods and ancestors, and the legendary history of Athens, to
which succeeded an almost equally fictitious account of later times. The
Persian war usually formed the centre of the narrative; in the age of
Isocrates and Demosthenes the Athenians were still living on the glories of
Marathon and Salamis. The Menexenus veils in panegyric the weak places of
|
