| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: one surely gets to know a person in the simple surroundings of the open
air--one SHARES the same joys--one feels friendship. What is it your
Shakespeare says? One moment, I have it. The friends thou hast, and their
adoption tried--grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel!"
"But," said I, feeling very friendly towards him, "the bother about my soul
is that it refuses to grapple anybody at all--and I am sure that the dead
weight of a friend whose adoption it had tried would kill it immediately.
Never yet has it shown the slightest sign of a hoop!"
He bumped against my knees and excused himself and the cart.
"My dear little lady, you must not take the quotation literally.
Naturally, one is not physically conscious of the hoops; but hoops there
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: 'Let him of you who has never sinned be the first to throw the
stone at her.' It was worth while living to have said that.
Like all poetical natures he loved ignorant people. He knew that
in the soul of one who is ignorant there is always room for a great
idea. But he could not stand stupid people, especially those who
are made stupid by education: people who are full of opinions not
one of which they even understand, a peculiarly modern type, summed
up by Christ when he describes it as the type of one who has the
key of knowledge, cannot use it himself, and does not allow other
people to use it, though it may be made to open the gate of God's
Kingdom. His chief war was against the Philistines. That is the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: day giving too much, and the next, when they are wary out of
season, giving perhaps too little. Purcel is in another class from
any I have mentioned. He is no debater, but appears in
conversation, as occasion rises, in two distinct characters, one of
which I admire and fear, and the other love. In the first, he is
radiantly civil and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hilltop,
and from that vantage-ground drops you his remarks like favours.
He seems not to share in our sublunary contentions; he wears no
sign of interest; when on a sudden there falls in a crystal of wit,
so polished that the dull do not perceive it, but so right that the
sensitive are silenced. True talk should have more body and blood,
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