| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Aeneid by Virgil: If nature plead not in a parent's heart,
Pity my tears, and pity her desert.
I know, my dearest lord, the time will come,
You in vain, reverse your cruel doom;
The faithless pirate soon will set to sea,
And bear the royal virgin far away!
A guest like him, a Trojan guest before,
In shew of friendship sought the Spartan shore,
And ravish'd Helen from her husband bore.
Think on a king's inviolable word;
And think on Turnus, her once plighted lord:
Aeneid |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: since the last high tides, which I respectfully submit. Please to
remember this is TALK; just as easy and just as formal as I choose
to make it.]
- I never saw an author in my life - saving, perhaps, one - that
did not purr as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat, (FELIS CATUS,
LINN.,) on having his fur smoothed in the right way by a skilful
hand.
But let me give you a caution. Be very careful how you tell an
author he is DROLL. Ten to one he will hate you; and if he does,
be sure he can do you a mischief, and very probably will. Say you
CRIED over his romance or his verses, and he will love you and send
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: it necessary to enlarge upon the obvious fact that Plato is a dramatic
writer, whose real opinions cannot always be assumed to be those which he
puts into the mouth of Socrates, or any other speaker who appears to have
the best of the argument; or to repeat the observation that he is a poet as
well as a philosopher; or to remark that he is not to be tried by a modern
standard, but interpreted with reference to his place in the history of
thought and the opinion of his time.
It has been said that the most characteristic feature of the Gorgias is the
assertion of the right of dissent, or private judgment. But this mode of
stating the question is really opposed both to the spirit of Plato and of
ancient philosophy generally. For Plato is not asserting any abstract
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