| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: Dawn as yellow as sulphur leaped on the mountain height;
Dawn, in the deepest glen, fell a wonder of light;
High and clear stood the palms in the eye of the brightening east,
And lo! from the sides of the sea the broken sound of the feast!
As, when in days of summer, through open windows, the fly
Swift as a breeze and loud as a trump goes by,
But when frosts in the field have pinched the wintering mouse,
Blindly noses and buzzes and hums in the firelit house:
So the sound of the feast gallantly trampled at night,
So it staggered and drooped, and droned in the morning light.
IV. THE RAID
Ballads |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: connection which are not visible at first sight. At the same time the
Phaedrus, although one of the most beautiful of the Platonic Dialogues, is
also more irregular than any other. For insight into the world, for
sustained irony, for depth of thought, there is no Dialogue superior, or
perhaps equal to it. Nevertheless the form of the work has tended to
obscure some of Plato's higher aims.
The first speech is composed 'in that balanced style in which the wise love
to talk' (Symp.). The characteristics of rhetoric are insipidity,
mannerism, and monotonous parallelism of clauses. There is more rhythm
than reason; the creative power of imagination is wanting.
''Tis Greece, but living Greece no more.'
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories by Alice Dunbar: be sure, she used a precious bit of that. Would all the work and
saving and skimping do good? Maybe, yes, maybe by Christmas.
Christmas Eve on Royal Street is no place for a weakling, for the
shouts and carousels of the roisterers will strike fear into the
bravest ones. Yet amid the cries and yells, the deafening blow
of horns and tin whistles, and the really dangerous fusillade of
fireworks, a little figure hurried along, one hand clutching
tightly the battered hat that the rude merry-makers had torn off,
the other grasping under the thin black cape a worn little
pocketbook.
Into the Mont de Piete she ran breathless, eager. The ticket?
The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories |
