| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: the fears of Alexa who, scrupulously vigilant in the management of
the household, preserved the American wife's usual aloofness from
her husband's business cares. Glennard felt that he could not
trust himself to a winter's solitude with her. He had an
unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about the letters, yet
could not be sure of steeling himself against the suicidal impulse
of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he thirsted
for a voice of pity and comprehension. But would his wife pity?
Would she understand? Again he found himself brought up abruptly
against his incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he
knew well enough how she would behave in the ordinary emergencies
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Ophe. Well, God dil'd you. They say the Owle was
a Bakers daughter. Lord, wee know what we are, but
know not what we may be. God be at your Table
King. Conceit vpon her Father
Ophe. Pray you let's haue no words of this: but when
they aske you what it meanes, say you this:
To morrow is S[aint]. Valentines day, all in the morning betime,
And I a Maid at your Window, to be your Valentine.
Then vp he rose, & don'd his clothes, & dupt the chamber dore,
Let in the Maid, that out a Maid, neuer departed more
King. Pretty Ophelia
Hamlet |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: which makes life obscure to us.'
Those strange, wild-eyed sibyls fixed eternally in the whirlwind of
ecstasy, those mighty-limbed and Titan prophets, labouring with the
secret of the earth and the burden of mystery, that guard and
glorify the chapel of Pope Sixtus at Rome - do they not tell us
more of the real spirit of the Italian Renaissance, of the dream of
Savonarola and of the sin of Borgia, than all the brawling boors
and cooking women of Dutch art can teach us of the real spirit of
the history of Holland?
And so in our own day, also, the two most vital tendencies of the
nineteenth century - the democratic and pantheistic tendency and
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