| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Magic of Oz by L. Frank Baum: and began waddling about in a small circle. It went around the circle
to the right three times, and then it went around to the left three
times. Then it hopped backward three times and forward three times.
"What are you doing?" asked Trot.
"Don't interrupt. This is an incantation," replied the Lonesome
Duck, but now it began making a succession of soft noises that sounded
like quacks and seemed to mean nothing at all. And it kept up these
sounds so long that Trot finally exclaimed:
"Can't you hurry up and finish that 'cantation? If it takes all
summer to make a couple of toadstools, you're not much of a magician."
"I told you not to interrupt," said the Lonesome Duck, sternly.
The Magic of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: keep on learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune
which is the occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see
my literature in print, and to measure experimentally how far I
stood from the favour of the public.
II
The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has
counted among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner,
Benjamin Constant, Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local
celebrity besides. By an accident, variously explained, it has its
rooms in the very buildings of the University of Edinburgh: a hall,
Turkey-carpeted, hung with pictures, looking, when lighted up at
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: unanswerable riddle to propound.
In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great
change of the past century has been effected by the admission
of detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at
length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less
wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on the
novelist. For some time it signified and expressed a more
ample contemplation of the conditions of man's life; but it
has recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely
technical and decorative stage, which it is, perhaps, still
too harsh to call survival. With a movement of alarm, the
|
