| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: As we began with saying, a mother and her little boy sat at their
cottage-door, gazing at the Great Stone Face, and talking about
it. The child's name was Ernest.
"Mother," said he, while the Titanic visage smiled on him, "I
wish that it could speak, for it looks so very kindly that its
voice must needs be pleasant. If I were to see a man with such a
face, I should love him dearly."
"If an old prophecy should come to pass," answered his mother,
"we may see a man, some time or other, with exactly such a face
as that."
"What prophecy do you mean, dear mother?" eagerly inquired
The Snow Image |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs: than touch the thing. Their blood is still upon it."
"I wish," said Bridge a trifle sternly, "that you would
try to control yourself a bit. Hysteria won't help us any.
Here we are, and we've to make the best of it. Besides
we must look after this young woman--she may be dy-
ing, and we haven't done a thing to help her."
The boy, evidently shamed, released his hold upon
Bridge and moved away. "I am sorry," he said. "I'll
try to do better; but, Oh! I was so frightened. You can-
not imagine how frightened I was."
"I had imagined," said Bridge, "from what I had
The Oakdale Affair |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: difficult and unmeaning to that of another; or that the sequence which is
clear to himself is puzzling to others. There are many passages in some of
our greatest modern poets which are far too obscure; in which there is no
proportion between style and subject, in which any half-expressed figure,
any harsh construction, any distorted collocation of words, any remote
sequence of ideas is admitted; and there is no voice 'coming sweetly from
nature,' or music adding the expression of feeling to thought. As if there
could be poetry without beauty, or beauty without ease and clearness. The
obscurities of early Greek poets arose necessarily out of the state of
language and logic which existed in their age. They are not examples to be
followed by us; for the use of language ought in every generation to become
The Republic |
