| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson: Recoils before the sight aghast.
But she, although the heavens be black,
Holds on upon the starboard tack,
For why? although to-day she sink,
Still safe she sails in printer's ink,
And though to-day the seamen drown,
My cut shall hand their memory down.
Poem: II
The careful angler chose his nook
At morning by the lilied brook,
And all the noon his rod he plied
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: conformity with human nature, that out of all this business
it was the last that came to be neglected. Night found him,
not only equipped with money of his own, but once more (as on
that former occasion) saddled with a considerable sum of
other people's.
Now it chanced there lived in the same boarding-house a
fellow-clerk of his, an honest fellow, with what is called a
weakness for drink - though it might, in this case, have been
called a strength, for the victim had been drunk for weeks
together without the briefest intermission. To this
unfortunate John intrusted a letter with an inclosure of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: a manner reproduced, and thus enjoy the emotions they were certain to
bring to the hearts of the masses,--a feeling analogous to that of
Macpherson when the name of his creation Ossian was transcribed into
all languages. That was certainly, for the Scotch lawyer, one of the
keenest, or at any rate the rarest, sensations a man could give
himself. Is it not the incognito of genius? To write the "Itinerary
from Paris to Jerusalem" is to take a share in the human glory of a
single epoch; but to endow his native land with another Homer, was not
that usurping the work of God?
The author knows too well the laws of narration to be ignorant of the
pledges this short preface is contracting for him; but he also knows
Ferragus |
