| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Stories From the Old Attic by Robert Harris: when he demanded which of his knights had helped her into this
situation, the princess, not willing to sacrifice any of the noble
and completely innocent knights of the castle, invented the story of
a secret lover from outside the castle walls.
The king suspected that his daughter was lying, or trying to
lie--for the girl was so honest that she could not dissemble with
conviction--so that he was now even more uncontrollably enraged than
before; he now began screaming directly at his daughter and breaking
larger and more expensive things. And because he could think of
nothing but her duplicity and disobedience and his injured honor and
her betrayal of his affection, he coldly (or rather hotly)
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: [You must not suppose that all I am going to say, as well as all I
have said, was told to the whole company. The young fellow whom
they call John was in the yard, sitting on a barrel and smoking a
cheroot, the fumes of which came in, not ungrateful, through the
open window. The divinity-student disappeared in the midst of our
talk. The poor relation in black bombazine, who looked and moved
as if all her articulations were elbow-joints, had gone off to her
chamber, after waiting with a look of soul-subduing decorum at the
foot of the stairs until one of the male sort had passed her and
ascended into the upper regions. This is a famous point of
etiquette in our boarding-house; in fact, between ourselves, they
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: and the wisdom of counsellors who have graciously recommended them and
persuaded the multitude to pass them, would be a far greater and more
ruinous error than any adherence to written law?
YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly.
STRANGER: Therefore, as there is a danger of this, the next best thing in
legislating is not to allow either the individual or the multitude to break
the law in any respect whatever.
YOUNG SOCRATES: True.
STRANGER: The laws would be copies of the true particulars of action as
far as they admit of being written down from the lips of those who have
knowledge?
Statesman |
