| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: the shadows, and the painted figures the realities, - I have
sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great
unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one
ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I
fled, and coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the
same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last
drowsy incantation!
- Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and courteous acts, - a thousand
faces that melted individually out of my recollection as the April
snow melts, but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers
whose roots are memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams. I
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Book of Remarkable Criminals by H. B. Irving: hasty, less decorous weapon than the old-fashioned pistol in the
hands of the determined burglar. The literature of crime, such
as it is, becomes vulgar and prosaic. Peace has no charm about
him, no gaiety, but he has the virtues of his defects. He,
unlike Sheppard, shuns company; he works alone, never depending
on accomplices; a "tight cock," as Sheppard would have phrased
it, and not relying on a like quality of tightness in his
fellows. Sheppard is a slave to his women, Edgeworth Bess and
Mrs. Maggot; Mrs. Peace and Sue Thompson are the slaves of
Peace. Sheppard loves to stroll openly about the London streets
in his fine suit of black, his ruffled shirt and his silver-
A Book of Remarkable Criminals |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: Caustic potash has a great affinity for carbonic acid; and it is
sufficient to shake it in order for it to seize upon the acid
and form bicarbonate of potassium. By these two means they
would be enabled to restore to the vitiated air its life-
supporting properties.
It is necessary, however, to add that the experiments had
hitherto been made _in anima vili_. Whatever its scientific
accuracy was, they were at present ignorant how it would answer
with human beings. The honor of putting it to the proof was
energetically claimed by J. T. Maston.
"Since I am not to go," said the brave artillerist, "I may at
From the Earth to the Moon |
