| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: of the ventriloquist's dummies, stuck one of his fingers (which
had become sealing-wax red) into the flame, and so sealed the parcel.
"Then there was the Disappearing Egg," he remarked, and produced
one from within my coat-breast and packed it, and also The Crying
Baby, Very Human. I handed each parcel to Gip as it was ready,
and he clasped them to his chest.
He said very little, but his eyes were eloquent; the clutch of
his arms was eloquent. He was the playground of unspeakable emotions.
These, you know, were REAL Magics. Then, with a start, I discovered
something moving about in my hat--something soft and jumpy. I whipped
it off, and a ruffled pigeon--no doubt a confederate--dropped out
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: of the opening. Where is Beethoven," cried Gambara, "to appreciate
this prodigious reaction of my opera on itself? How completely it all
rests on the bass.
"It is thus that Beethoven composed his E minor symphony. But his
heroic work is purely instrumental, whereas here, my heroic phrase is
worked out on a sextette of the finest human voices, and a chorus of
the faithful on guard at the door of the sacred dwelling. I have every
resource of melody and harmony at my command, an orchestra and voices.
Listen to the utterance of all these phases of human life, rich and
poor;--battle, triumph, and exhaustion!
"Ali arrives, the Koran prevails in every province (duet in D minor).
Gambara |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: hills of Greece, and rise thence singing into the heaven of heavens, yet
they are hard to tempt into a gilded cage, however amusingly made and
plentifully stored with comforts. Royal societies, associations of
savants, and the like, are good for many things, but not for the
breeding of art and genius: for they are things which cannot be bred.
Such institutions are excellent for physical science, when, as among us
now, physical science is going on the right method: but where, as in
Alexandria, it was going on an utterly wrong method, they stereotype the
errors of the age, and invest them with the prestige of authority, and
produce mere Sorbonnes, and schools of pedants. To literature, too,
they do some good, that is, in a literary age--an age of reflection
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