| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: to work, and we fancy that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual
jaws we can find the secret of the ruin of the Empire. But it was
not so. The vices of Tiberius could not destroy that supreme
civilisation, any more than the virtues of the Antonines could save
it. It fell for other, for less interesting reasons. The sibyls
and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to interpret for some
that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call the
Renaissance; but what do the drunken boors and bawling peasants of
Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland? The more
abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the
temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy: cramp at the front of the sledge where he had been before, he
was going round the horse's quarters to put the breechband and
pad straight and cover him with the cloth, but at that moment
he noticed that something was moving in the sledge and Nikita's
head rose up out of the snow that covered it. Nikita, who was
half frozen, rose with great difficulty and sat up, moving his
hand before his nose in a strange manner just as if he were
driving away flies. He waved his hand and said something, and
seemed to Vasili Andreevich to be calling him. Vasili
Andreevich left the cloth unadjusted and went up to the sledge.
'What is it?' he asked. 'What are you saying?'
Master and Man |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Flower Fables by Louisa May Alcott: her hair, and happy feelings in her heart, better and wiser for her
visit to Fairy-Land.
"Now, Star-Twinkle, what have you to teach?" asked the Queen.
"Nothing but a little song I heard the hare-bells singing," replied
the Fairy, and, taking her harp, sang, in a low, sweet voice:--
THE FLOWER'S LESSON.
THERE grew a fragrant rose-tree where the brook flows,
With two little tender buds, and one full rose;
When the sun went down to his bed in the west,
The little buds leaned on the rose-mother's breast,
While the bright eyed stars their long watch kept,
Flower Fables |
