| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: Wapping, and Ratcliff, were very little touched; so that people went
about their business unconcerned, carried on their trades, kept open
their shops, and conversed freely with one another in all the city, the
east and north-east suburbs, and in Southwark, almost as if the plague
had not been among us.
Even when the north and north-west suburbs were fully infected,
viz., Cripplegate, Clarkenwell, Bishopsgate, and Shoreditch, yet still
all the rest were tolerably well. For example from 25th July to 1st
August the bill stood thus of all diseases: -
St Giles, Cripplegate 554
St Sepulchers 250
A Journal of the Plague Year |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: during the analogous period, the Siecle Louis Quinze. The "Contrat
Social," and the rest of their doctrines, moral and metaphysical, will
always have their admirers on earth, as long as that variety of the
human species exists for whose especial behoof Theodorus held that laws
were made; and the whole form of thought met with great approbation in
after years at Rome, where Epicurus carried it to its highest
perfection. After that, under the pressure of a train of rather severe
lessons, which Gibbon has detailed in his "Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire," little or nothing was heard of it, save sotto voce, perhaps, at
the Papal courts of the sixteenth century. To revive it publicly, or at
least as much of it as could be borne by a world now for seventeen
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Virginian by Owen Wister: back from coming to the water as the other had done.
"Your trace ain't unhitched," commented the Virginian, pointing.
Balaam loosed the strap he had forgotten, and cut the horse again
for consistency's sake. The animal, bewildered, now came down to
the water, with its head in the air, and snuffing as it took
short, nervous steps.
The Virginian looked on at this, silent and sombre. He could
scarcely interfere between another man and his own beast. Neither
he nor Balaam was among those who say their prayers. Yet in this
omission they were not equal. A half-great poet once had a wholly
great day, and in that great day he was able to write a poem that
The Virginian |
