| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Poems of William Blake by William Blake: And all shall say, without a use this shining women liv'd,
Or did she only live to be at death the food of worms.
The Cloud reclind upon his airy throne and answerd thus.
Then if thou art the food of worms, O virgin of the skies,
How great thy use, how great thy blessing, every thing that lives.
Lives not alone nor or itself: fear not and I will call,
The weak worm from its lowly bed, and thou shalt hear its voice.
Come forth worm and the silent valley, to thy pensive queen.
The helpless worm arose and sat upon the Lillys leaf,
And the bright Cloud saild on, to find his partner in the vale.
III.
Poems of William Blake |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: exertion of faith be in and out of our own minds at the same instant. How
can we conceive Him under the forms of time and space, who is out of time
and space? How get rid of such forms and see Him as He is? How can we
imagine His relation to the world or to ourselves? Innumerable
contradictions follow from either of the two alternatives, that God is or
that He is not. Yet we are far from saying that we know nothing of Him,
because all that we know is subject to the conditions of human thought. To
the old belief in Him we return, but with corrections. He is a person, but
not like ourselves; a mind, but not a human mind; a cause, but not a
material cause, nor yet a maker or artificer. The words which we use are
imperfect expressions of His true nature; but we do not therefore lose
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: blacks, would just take one of these Agamemnons and Ajaxes quietly
by his beautiful, strong arm, trot the unresisting statue down a
little gallery of legal shams, and turn the poor fellow out at the
other end, 'naked, as from the earth he came.' There is more
latent life, more of the coiled spring in the sleeping dog, about a
recumbent figure of Michael Angelo's than about the most excited of
Greek statues. The very marble seems to wrinkle with a wild energy
that we never feel except in dreams.
I think this letter has turned into a sermon, but I had nothing
interesting to talk about.
I do wish you and Mr. Babington would think better of it and come
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