| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: what must be the condition of that people? I need not lift up
the veil by giving you any experience of my own. Every one that
can put two ideas together, must see the most fearful results
from such a state of things as I have just mentioned. If any of
these three millions find for themselves companions, and prove
themselves honest, upright, virtuous persons to each other, yet
in these <319>cases--few as I am bound to confess they are--the
virtuous live in constant apprehension of being torn asunder by
the merciless men-stealers that claim them as their property.
This is American slavery; no marriage--no education--the light of
the gospel shut out from the dark mind of the bondman--and he
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Forth went Shingebis, the diver,
Wrestled all night with the North-Wind,
Wrestled naked on the moorlands
With the fierce Kabibonokka,
Till his panting breath grew fainter,
Till his frozen grasp grew feebler,
Till he reeled and staggered backward,
And retreated, baffled, beaten,
To the kingdom of Wabasso,
To the land of the White Rabbit,
Hearing still the gusty laughter,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: place, hardly enough for them to grow or play in, but which, from
the twelfth century down to our own day, have been continually
making their appearances in art, under various modes and at various
times, coming fitfully and wilfully, as children, as flowers, are
apt to do: spring always seeming to one as if the flowers had been
in hiding, and only came out into the sun because they were afraid
that grown up people would grow tired of looking for them and give
up the search; and the life of a child being no more than an April
day on which there is both rain and sun for the narcissus.
It is the imaginative quality of Christ's own nature that makes him
this palpitating centre of romance. The strange figures of poetic
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