| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Off on a Comet by Jules Verne: as to the locality in which it had been committed to the waves.
A telescope-case would probably be the property of some one on board
a ship; and the figures obviously referred to the astronomical wonders
that had been experienced.
To these general observations Captain Servadac objected that
he thought it unlikely that any one on board a ship would use
a telescope-case for this purpose, but would be sure to use
a bottle as being more secure; and, accordingly, he should rather
be inclined to believe that the message had been set afloat
by some _savant_ left alone, perchance, upon some isolated coast.
"But, however interesting it might be," observed the count,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: to analysis and discussion, and always torn by civil disturbances.
Modern music demands perfect peace; it is the language of loving and
sentimental souls, inclined to lofty emotional aspiration.
"That language, a thousand times fuller than the language of words, is
to speech and ideas what the thought is to its utterance; it arouses
sensations and ideas in their primitive form, in that part of us where
sensations and ideas have their birth, but leaves them as they are in
each of us. That power over our inmost being is one of the grandest
facts in music. All other arts present to the mind a definite
creation; those of music are indefinite--infinite. We are compelled to
accept the ideas of the poet, the painter's picture, the sculptor's
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer: Horror I had expected--and death, or worse. Instead, I saw
a lovely face, crowned with a disordered mass of curling hair;
I saw a white arm upholding the stone slab, a shapely arm
clasped about the elbow by a broad gold bangle.
The girl climbed into the cellar and placed the lantern on the stone floor.
In the dim light she was unreal--a figure from an opium vision, with her
clinging silk draperies and garish jewelry, with her feet encased in little
red slippers. In short, this was the houri of my vision, materialized.
It was difficult to believe that we were in modern, up-to-date England;
easy to dream that we were the captives of a caliph, in a dungeon
in old Bagdad.
The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu |
