| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: And the devil he comes and begins to blow."
In America the tow is soaked in a solution that makes it
fire-proof, in absolute liberty and large knowledge;
consequently, accidents do not exceed the regular percentage
arranged by the devil for each class and climate under the skies.
But the freedom of the young girl has its draw-backs. She is--I
say it with all reluctance--irreverent, from her forty-dollar
bonnet to the buckles in her eighteen-dollar shoes. She talks
flippantly to her parents and men old enough to be her
grandfather. She has a prescriptive right to the society of the
man who arrives. The parents admit it.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: and listened to the hounds. Still on they came, and now the near
woods resounded through all their aisles with their demoniac cry.
At length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground,
and snapping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock;
but, spying the dead fox, she suddenly ceased her hounding as if
struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in
silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother,
were sobered into silence by the mystery. Then the hunter came
forward and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. They
waited in silence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush
a while, and at length turned off into the woods again. That
Walden |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: emotion; again, the simplest, that in which the meaning and melody
are attained with the fewest and most significant notes possible;
and, finally, the usefullest, that music which makes the best words
most beautiful, which enchants them in our memories each with its
own glory of sound, and which applies them closest to the heart at
the moment we need them.
And not only in the material and in the course, but yet more
earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl's education be as serious
as a boy's. You bring up your girls as if they were meant for
sideboard ornaments, and then complain of their frivolity. Give
them the same advantages that you give their brothers--appeal to the
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