| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from From London to Land's End by Daniel Defoe: storm should happen; for many people had told him it would
certainly fall if it came to blow a little harder than ordinary.
But he happened at last to be in it once too often--namely, when
that dreadful tempest blew, November 27, 1703. This tempest began
on the Wednesday before, and blew with such violence, and shook the
lighthouse so much, that, as they told me there, Mr. Winstanley
would fain have been on shore, and made signals for help; but no
boats durst go off to him; and, to finish the tragedy, on the
Friday, November 26, when the tempest was so redoubled that it
became a terror to the whole nation, the first sight there seaward
that the people of Plymouth were presented with in the morning
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: The sliding barges vanish like a dream,
The seaman's shrilling pipe not enters here,
Nor the rude cries of porters on the pier.
And if so rare the house, how rarer far
The welcome and the weal that therein are!
So free the access, the doors so widely thrown,
You half imagine all to be your own.
AD MARTIALEM
GO(D) knows, my Martial, if we two could be
To enjoy our days set wholly free;
To the true life together bend our mind,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family
has stuck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a
quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my
name, made his appearance in the wild and forest -- bordered
settlement which has since become a city. And here his
descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their
earthly substance with the soil, until no small portion of it
must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a
little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the
attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust
for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as
The Scarlet Letter |
