| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Poems of William Blake by William Blake: The daughter of beauty wip'd her pitying tears with her white veil,
And said, Alas! I knew not this, and therefore did I weep:
That God would love a Worm I knew, and punish the evil foot
That wilful bruis'd its helpless form: but that he cherish'd it
With milk and oil I never knew, and therefore did I weep,
And I complaind in the mild air, because I fade away.
And lay me down in thy cold bed, and leave my shining lot.
Queen of the vales, the matron Clay answered: I heard thy sighs.
And all thy moans flew o'er my roof, but I have call'd them down:
Wilt thou O Queen enter my house, tis given thee to enter,
And to return: fear nothing, enter with thy virgin feet.
Poems of William Blake |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: be any truth in this science, do all unanimously agree to laugh
at and despise it; and none but the poor ignorant vulgar give it
any credit, and that only upon the word of such silly wretches as
I and my fellows, who can hardly write or read. I then asked him
why he had not calculated his own nativity, to see whether it
agreed with Bickerstaff's prediction? at which he shook his head,
and said, Oh! sir, this is no time for jesting, but for repenting
those fooleries, as I do now from the very bottom of my heart. By
what I can gather from you, said I, the observations and
predictions you printed, with your almanacks, were mere
impositions on the people. He reply'd, if it were otherwise I
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: touch it in the least, it flies about like ashes or unslaked
lime. In any danger of war, these people descend into their
caves, and carrying in their booty and prey along with them,
stay quietly within, secure from every attack. And when
Sertorius, leaving Metellus some distance off had placed his
camp near this hill, they slighted and despised him, imagining,
that he retired into these parts, being overthrown by the
Romans. And whether out of anger and resentment, or out of his
unwillingness to be thought to fly from his enemies, early in
the morning he rode up to view the situation of the place. But
finding there was no way to come at it, as he rode about,
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