| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Paradise Lost by John Milton: The ruin of so many glorious once
And perfect while they stood? how last unfold
The secrets of another world, perhaps
Not lawful to reveal? yet for thy good
This is dispensed; and what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By likening spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best; though what if Earth
Be but a shadow of Heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?
As yet this world was not, and Chaos wild
Paradise Lost |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: knocking another luminous hole into the dusk. The Greeks
would have made a noble myth of such an one; how he
distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-
collected it; and the little bull's-eye, which was his
instrument, and held enough fire to kindle a whole parish,
would have been fitly commemorated in the legend. Now, like
all heroic tasks, his labours draw towards apotheosis, and in
the light of victory himself shall disappear. For another
advance has been effected. Our tame stars are to come out in
future, not one by one, but all in a body and at once. A
sedate electrician somewhere in a back office touches a spring
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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: And the angel-spirit of rain laughed out loud in the night.
Loud as the maddened river raves in the cloven glen,
Angel of rain! you laughed and leaped on the roofs of men;
And the sleepers sprang in their beds, and joyed and feared as you fell.
You struck, and my cabin quailed; the roof of it roared like a bell.
You spoke, and at once the mountain shouted and shook with brooks.
You ceased, and the day returned, rosy, with virgin looks.
And methought that beauty and terror are only one, not two;
And the world has room for love, and death, and thunder, and dew;
And all the sinews of hell slumber in summer air;
And the face of God is a rock, but the face of the rock is fair.
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