| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: was Herrick's song again:
A heart as soft, a heart as kind,
A heart as sound and free
Is in the whole world thou canst find,
That heart I'll give to thee.
"Come, gentlemen," I cried, "this is folly, sheer madness.
You can never deal with the matter in this way. Think of the
girl who is singing down yonder. What would happen to her,
what would she suffer, from scandal, from her own feelings, if
either of you should be killed, or even seriously hurt by the
other? There must be no quarrel between you."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: to animals or children, because they do not know the danger. Against this
inversion of the ordinary use of language Laches reclaims, but is in some
degree mollified by a compliment to his own courage. Still, he does not
like to see an Athenian statesman and general descending to sophistries of
this sort. Socrates resumes the argument. Courage has been defined to be
intelligence or knowledge of the terrible; and courage is not all virtue,
but only one of the virtues. The terrible is in the future, and therefore
the knowledge of the terrible is a knowledge of the future. But there can
be no knowledge of future good or evil separated from a knowledge of the
good and evil of the past or present; that is to say, of all good and evil.
Courage, therefore, is the knowledge of good and evil generally. But he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: himself by his own entire good faith and triumphant
literality of vision, till the trap closes and shuts him in
an inconsistency. The allegories of the Interpreter and of
the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains are all actually
performed, like stage-plays, before the pilgrims. The son of
Mr. Great-grace visibly 'tumbles hills about with his words.'
Adam the First has his condemnation written visibly on his
forehead, so that Faithful reads it. At the very instant the
net closes round the pilgrims, 'the white robe falls from the
black man's body.' Despair 'getteth him a grievous crab-tree
cudgel'; it was in 'sunshiny weather' that he had his fits;
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