| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: friends. She therefore followed the messenger to a small
apartment where the refreshments were prepared, and from which
the general company was excluded. She found an old man, who, at
her approach, rose up and bowed profoundly. His appearance
indicated a broken constitution, and his dress, though sedulously
rendered conforming to the etiquette of a ballroom, was worn and
tarnished, and hung in folds about his emaciated person. Lady
Bothwell was about to feel for her purse, expecting to get rid of
the supplicant at the expense of a little money, but some fear of
a mistake arrested her purpose. She therefore gave the man
leisure to explain himself.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Hiero by Xenophon: "most power of triumphing over our enemies," when every tyrant knows
full well they are all his enemies, every man of them, who are
despotically ruled by him? And to put the whole of them to death or to
imprison them is hardly possible; or who will be his subjects
presently? Not so, but knowing they are his enemies, he must perform
this dexterous feat:[14] he must keep them at arm's length, and yet be
compelled to lean upon them.
[14] Lit. "he must at one and the same moment guard against them, and
yet be driven also to depend upon them."
But be assured, Simonides, that when a tyrant fears any of his
citizens, he is in a strait; it is ill work to see them living and ill
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary
commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in
itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or
disturbed me. I continued the story:
"But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the
door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the
maliceful hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly
and prodigious demeanour, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in
guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon
the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend
enwritten--
The Fall of the House of Usher |
