| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare: From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feather'd king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.
Let the priest in surplice white,
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-defying swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.
And thou, treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak'st
With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: Samson's bees did in that of the lion. But bees or flies, each
sprang from an egg, independent of the carcass, having a vitality of
its own: it was fostered by the carcass it fed on during
development; but bred from it it was not, any more than Marat was
bred from the decay of the Ancien Regime. There are flies which, by
feeding on putridity, become poisonous themselves, as did Marat:
but even they owe their vitality and organisation to something
higher than that on which they feed; and each of them, however,
defaced and debased, was at first a "thought of God." All true
manhood consists in the defiance of circumstances; and if any man be
the creature of circumstances, it is because he has become so, like
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: to define the meaning. Or, again, the opposite result is produced, when
the world refuses to allow some sect or body of men the possession of an
honourable name which they have assumed, or applies it to them only in
mockery or irony.
The term 'Sophist' is one of those words of which the meaning has been both
contracted and enlarged. Passages may be quoted from Herodotus and the
tragedians, in which the word is used in a neutral sense for a contriver or
deviser or inventor, without including any ethical idea of goodness or
badness. Poets as well as philosophers were called Sophists in the fifth
century before Christ. In Plato himself the term is applied in the sense
of a 'master in art,' without any bad meaning attaching to it (Symp.;
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