| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Legend of Montrose by Walter Scott: half the princes of Europe!"
"Captain Dalgetty," said Lord Menteith, whose lot it was to stand
peacemaker throughout the evening, "please to understand that
Anderson waits upon no one but myself; but I will help Sibbald to
undo your corslet with much pleasure."
"Too much trouble for you, my lord," said Dalgetty; "and yet it
would do you no harm to practise how a handsome harness is put on
and put off. I can step in and out of mine like a glove; only
to-night, although not EBRIUS, I am, in the classic phrase, VINO
CIBOQUE GRAVATUS."
By this time he was unshelled, and stood before the fire musing
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: contemplation of which would raise them for the moment above
matters of transient concern. For more than half a century any
citizen might have gratis the benefit of oral instruction from
such a man as he. And I sometimes think, by the way,
that--curtailed as it is to literary proportions in the dialogues
of Plato, bereft of all that personal potency which it had when
it flowed, instinct with earnestness, from the lips of the
teacher--even to this day the wit of man has perhaps devised no
better general gymnastics for the understanding than the Sokratic
dialectic. I am far from saying that all Athens listened to
Sokrates or understood him: had it been so, the caricature of
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: to bring him up Herself, many follies might have been saved the youth.
His aunt, Miss Eliza St. Michael, though a pattern of good intentions,
was not always a pattern of wisdom. Moreover, how should a spinster bring
up a boy fitly?
Of the Rieppes, father and daughter, I also learned a little more. They
did not (most people believed) come from Georgia. Natchez and Mobile
seemed to divide the responsibility of giving them to the world. It was
quite certain the General had run away from Chattanooga. Nobody disputed
this, or offered any other battle as the authentic one. Of late the
Rieppes were seldom to be seen in Kings Port. Their house (if it had ever
been their own property, which I heard hotly argued both ways) had been
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