| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: And the woods wore their noonday dress -
The glory of their silentness.
From the island summit to the seas,
Trees mounted, and trees drooped, and trees
Groped upward in the gaps. The green
Inarboured talus and ravine
By fathoms. By the multitude
The rugged columns of the wood
And bunches of the branches stood;
Thick as a mob, deep as a sea,
And silent as eternity.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: All of which is gross nonsense. Unfortunately, in Shakespear's case,
prudery, which cannot prevent the accusation from being whispered,
does prevent the refutation from being shouted. Mr Harris, the
deep-voiced, refuses to be silenced. He dismisses with proper
contempt the stupidity which places an outrageous construction on
Shakespear's apologies in the sonnets for neglecting that "perfect
ceremony" of love which consists in returning calls and making
protestations and giving presents and paying the trumpery attentions
which men of genius always refuse to bother about, and to which touchy
people who have no genius attach so much importance. No leader who
had not been tampered with by the psychopathic monomaniacs could ever
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli: liberality, yet he did not strive afterwards to keep it up, when he
made war on the King of France; and he made many wars without imposing
any extraordinary tax on his subjects, for he supplied his additional
expenses out of his long thriftiness. The present King of Spain would
not have undertaken or conquered in so many enterprises if he had been
reputed liberal. A prince, therefore, provided that he has not to rob
his subjects, that he can defend himself, that he does not become poor
and abject, that he is not forced to become rapacious, ought to hold
of little account a reputation for being mean, for it is one of those
vices which will enable him to govern.
And if any one should say: Caesar obtained empire by liberality, and
The Prince |
