| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: straining every muscle; but in the fore part of the boat the soldier,
the peasant, and the old beggar woman watched the sailors with the
sympathy naturally felt by toilers who live by the sweat of their brow
and know the rough struggle, the strenuous excitement of effort. These
folk, moreover, whose lives were spent in the open air, had all seen
the warnings of danger in the sky, and their faces were grave. The
young mother rocked her child, singing an old hymn of the Church for a
lullaby.
"If we ever get there at all," the soldier remarked to the peasant,
"it will be because the Almighty is bent on keeping us alive."
"Ah! He is the Master," said the old woman, "but I think it will be
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott: sufficient to counterbalance the infamy which my countrymen, both
those whom I desert and those whom I join, will attach to the
name of the political renegade. It is not to be thought of. And
yet, what choice remains between this lot and the ignominious
scaffold? Nothing can save me but reconciliation with these men;
and, to accomplish this, I have promised to Langley that Isabella
shall marry him ere midnight, and to Mareschal, that she shall do
so without compulsion. I have but one remedy betwixt me and
ruin--her consent to take a suitor whom she dislikes, upon such
short notice as would disgust her, even were he a favoured lover
--But I must trust to the romantic generosity of her disposition;
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: dreamt of reproaching Milton's Lucifer for not seeing the comic side
of his fall; and nobody who has read Mr Harris's stories desires to
have them lightened by chapters from the hand of Artemus Ward. Yet he
knows the taste and the value of humor. He was one of the few men of
letters who really appreciated Oscar Wilde, though he did not rally
fiercely to Wilde's side until the world deserted Oscar in his ruin.
I myself was present at a curious meeting between the two, when
Harris, on the eve of the Queensberry trial, prophesied to Wilde with
miraculous precision exactly what immediately afterwards happened to
him, and warned him to leave the country. It was the first time
within my knowledge that such a forecast proved true. Wilde, though
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