| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: fall due for another letter; and as the letter was the condition of his
stipend, he had been so careful as to prepare it beforehand and leave
it with Catriona to be despatched. The fact of our correspondence
aroused her suspicions, and he was no sooner gone than she had burst
the seal. What I received began accordingly in the writing of James
More:
"My dear Sir, - Your esteemed favour came to hand duly, and I have to
acknowledge the inclosure according to agreement. It shall be all
faithfully expended on my daughter, who is well, and desires to be
remembered to her dear friend. I find her in rather a melancholy
disposition, but trust in the mercy of God to see her re-established.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: male-dictions.
The next cast--ah, the pride of it, the regal splendor of it! the
thrill that ran down from finger-tip to toe! Then the water
boiled. He broke for the fly and got it. There remained enough
sense in me to give him all he wanted when he jumped not once,
but twenty times, before the up-stream flight that ran my line
out to the last half-dozen turns, and I saw the nickelled
reel-bar glitter under the thinning green coils. My thumb was
burned deep when I strove to stopper the line.
I did not feel it till later, for my soul was out in the dancing
weir, praying for him to turn ere he took my tackle away. And
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: us to speak and to think. The names dialectic and rhetoric are passing out
of use; we hardly examine seriously into their nature and limits, and
probably the arts both of speaking and of conversation have been unduly
neglected by us. But the mind of Socrates pierces through the differences
of times and countries into the essential nature of man; and his words
apply equally to the modern world and to the Athenians of old. Would he
not have asked of us, or rather is he not asking of us, Whether we have
ceased to prefer appearances to reality? Let us take a survey of the
professions to which he refers and try them by his standard. Is not all
literature passing into criticism, just as Athenian literature in the age
of Plato was degenerating into sophistry and rhetoric? We can discourse
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