| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: left her room and went down, the same unaltered quiet that had
baffled Knowles steadied her step and cooled her eyes.
After you have made a sacrifice of yourself for others, did you
ever notice how apt you were to doubt, as soon as the deed was
irrevocable, whether, after all, it were worth while to have done
it? How mean seems the good gained! How new and unimagined the
agony of empty hands and stifled wish! Very slow the angels are,
sometimes, that are sent to minister!
Margret, going down the stairs that morning, found none of the
chivalric unselfish glow of the night before in her home. It was
an old, bare house in the midst of dreary stubble fields, in
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: barrel of pork, two hogsheads of biscuit, and a proportion of peas,
flour, and what other things we could spare; and taking three casks
of sugar, some rum, and some pieces of eight from them for
satisfaction, we left them, taking on board with us, at their own
earnest request, the youth and the maid, and all their goods.
The young lad was about seventeen years of age, a pretty, well-
bred, modest, and sensible youth, greatly dejected with the loss of
his mother, and also at having lost his father but a few months
before, at Barbadoes. He begged of the surgeon to speak to me to
take him out of the ship; for he said the cruel fellows had
murdered his mother: and indeed so they had, that is to say,
Robinson Crusoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: the most of an astronomer amongst us, and has made the nature of the
universe his special study, should speak first, beginning with the
generation of the world and going down to the creation of man; next, I am
to receive the men whom he has created, and of whom some will have profited
by the excellent education which you have given them; and then, in
accordance with the tale of Solon, and equally with his law, we will bring
them into court and make them citizens, as if they were those very
Athenians whom the sacred Egyptian record has recovered from oblivion, and
thenceforward we will speak of them as Athenians and fellow-citizens.
SOCRATES: I see that I shall receive in my turn a perfect and splendid
feast of reason. And now, Timaeus, you, I suppose, should speak next,
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