| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Paradise Lost by John Milton: Misleads the amazed night-wanderer from his way
To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool;
There swallowed up and lost, from succour far.
So glistered the dire Snake, and into fraud
Led Eve, our credulous mother, to the tree
Of prohibition, root of all our woe;
Which when she saw, thus to her guide she spake.
Serpent, we might have spared our coming hither,
Fruitless to me, though fruit be here to excess,
The credit of whose virtue rest with thee;
Wonderous indeed, if cause of such effects.
Paradise Lost |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: naturalists, gentlemen, and sportsmen, which remind one at every
page (and what higher praise can one give?) of White's "History of
Selborne." These last, with Mr. Gosse's "Canadian Naturalist," and
his little book "The Ocean," not forgetting Darwin's delightful
"Voyage of the Beagle and Adventure," ought to be in the hands of
every lad who is likely to travel to our colonies.
For general Geology, Professor Ansted's Introduction is excellent;
while, as a specimen of the way in which a single district may be
thoroughly worked out, and the universal method of induction learnt
from a narrow field of objects, what book can, or perhaps ever
will, compare with Mr. Hugh Miller's "Old Red Sandstone"?
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: germs of flattering hopes. Beaux, wits, and fops, men whose sentiments
are fed by sucking their canes, those of a great name, or a great
fame, those of the highest or the lowest rank in her own world, they
all blanch before her. She has conquered the right to converse as long
and as often as she chooses with the men who seem to her agreeable,
without being entered on the tablets of gossip. Certain coquettish
women are capable of following a plan of this kind for seven years in
order to gratify their fancies later; but to suppose any such
reservations in the Marquise de Listomere would be to calumniate her.
I have had the happiness of knowing this phoenix. She talks well; I
know how to listen; consequently I please her, and I go to her
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