| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Wrong Box by Stevenson & Osbourne: side, bulk--on the other, genuine heroic fire.
'Down you shall come, you great big, ugly brute!' cried Morris
aloud, with something of that passion which swept the Parisian
mob against the walls of the Bastille. 'Down you shall come, this
night. I'll have none of you in my lobby.'
The face, from its indecent expression, had particularly animated
the zeal of our iconoclast; and it was against the face that he
began his operations. The great height of the demigod--for he
stood a fathom and half in his stocking-feet--offered a
preliminary obstacle to this attack. But here, in the first
skirmish of the battle, intellect already began to triumph over
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: of tragedy; at the sight of that white head of his and beyond it the
black water in the trenches of the Bastille lying still as a canal in
Venice, I had no words to answer him. Facino Cane thought, no doubt,
that I judged him, as the rest had done, with a disdainful pity; his
gesture expressed the whole philosophy of despair.
Perhaps his story had taken him back to happy days and to Venice. He
caught up his clarionet and made plaintive music, playing a Venetian
boat-song with something of his lost skill, the skill of the young
patrician lover. It was a sort of /Super flumina Babylonis/. Tears
filled my eyes. Any belated persons walking along the Boulevard
Bourdon must have stood still to listen to an exile's last prayer, a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: satisfactory proof of the doctrine which we are maintaining; for if there
are arts, there is a standard of measure, and if there is a standard of
measure, there are arts; but if either is wanting, there is neither.
YOUNG SOCRATES: True; and what is the next step?
STRANGER: The next step clearly is to divide the art of measurement into
two parts, as we have said already, and to place in the one part all the
arts which measure number, length, depth, breadth, swiftness with their
opposites; and to have another part in which they are measured with the
mean, and the fit, and the opportune, and the due, and with all those
words, in short, which denote a mean or standard removed from the extremes.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Here are two vast divisions, embracing two very different
Statesman |
