| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "Alas, alas! oh what have I done?
Can listening aught avail me?
I hear him toward my room hasten on,
To hail me.
My heart beat high, to myself I said:
'O would that thou hadst never betray'd
That night of love to thy mother!'"
YOUTH.
Alas! I foolishly ventured there,
For the cheating silence misled me;
Ah, sweetest! let me to thee repair,--
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from From London to Land's End by Daniel Defoe: Nor is the Lizard Point less useful (though not so far west) than
the other, which is more properly called the Land's End; but if we
may credit our mariners, it is more frequently first discovered
from the sea. For as our mariners, knowing by the soundings when
they are in the mouth of the Channel, do then most naturally stand
to the southward, to avoid mistaking the Channel, and to shun the
Severn Sea or Bristol Channel, but still more to avoid running upon
Scilly and the rocks about it, as is observed before--I say, as
they carefully keep to the southward till they think they are fair
with the Channel, and then stand to the northward again, or north-
east, to make the land, this is the reason why the Lizard is,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: and the nobility what the king and the nobility did against the
insurgents of the sixteenth century. Therefore the popular historians,
who know very well that in a like case the people will do the same
thing over again, have no excuse for blaming Catherine de' Medici and
Charles IX.
"All power," said Casimir Perier, on learning what power ought to be,
"is a permanent conspiracy." We admire the anti-social maxims put
forth by daring writers; why, then, this disapproval which, in France,
attaches to all social truths when boldly proclaimed? This question
will explain, in itself alone, historical errors. Apply the answer to
the destructive doctrines which flatter popular passions, and to the
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