| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: all and taking care of all; and there follows him the array of gods and
demi-gods, marshalled in eleven bands; Hestia alone abides at home in the
house of heaven; of the rest they who are reckoned among the princely
twelve march in their appointed order. They see many blessed sights in the
inner heaven, and there are many ways to and fro, along which the blessed
gods are passing, every one doing his own work; he may follow who will and
can, for jealousy has no place in the celestial choir. But when they go to
banquet and festival, then they move up the steep to the top of the vault
of heaven. The chariots of the gods in even poise, obeying the rein, glide
rapidly; but the others labour, for the vicious steed goes heavily,
weighing down the charioteer to the earth when his steed has not been
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Manon Lescaut by Abbe Prevost: once more, and to induce me to return with him to France; that on
receipt of the last letter which I had written to him from Havre,
he started for that place, and was himself the bearer of the
succour which I solicited; that he had been sensibly affected on
learning my departure, and that he would have instantly followed
me, if there had been a vessel bound for the same destination;
that he had been for several months endeavouring to hear of one
in the various seaport towns, and that, having at length found
one at St. Malo which was weighing anchor for Martinique, he
embarked, in the expectation of easily passing from thence to New
Orleans; that the St. Malo vessel having been captured by Spanish
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: Sometimes I think it has a new and awful significance that we do
not see.
Your ears are openest to the war-trumpet now. Ha! that is
spirit-stirring!--that wakes up the old Revolutionary blood!
Your manlier nature had been smothered under drudgery, the poor
daily necessity for bread and butter. I want you to go down into
this common, every-day drudgery, and consider if there might not
be in it also a great warfare. Not a serfish war; not altogether
ignoble, though even its only end may appear to be your daily
food. A great warfare, I think, with a history as old as the
world, and not without its pathos. It has its slain. Men and
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
