| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: watched a forester from Alsace while some one was singing 'LES
MALHEURS DE LA FRANCE,' at a baptismal party in the neighbourhood
of Fontainebleau. He arose from the table and took his son aside,
close by where I was standing. 'Listen, listen,' he said, bearing
on the boy's shoulder, 'and remember this, my son.' A little after
he went out into the garden suddenly, and I could hear him sobbing
in the darkness.
The humiliation of their arms and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine
made a sore pull on the endurance of this sensitive people; and
their hearts are still hot, not so much against Germany as against
the Empire. In what other country will you find a patriotic ditty
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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: the river. But all to no purpose. No merchant would expose his
valuable ship, with its cargo, to the risk of being sunk by
Farnese's batteries, merely for the sake of finding a market no
better than a hundred others which could be entered without
incurring danger. No doubt if the merchants of Holland had
followed out the maxim Vivre pour autrui, they would have braved
ruin and destruction rather than behold their neighbours of
Antwerp enslaved. No doubt if they could have risen to a broad
philosophic view of the future interests of the Netherlands, they
would have seen that Antwerp must be saved, no matter if some of
them were to lose money by it. But men do not yet sacrifice
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: A moment more, the trees had stooped to kiss
Pale Daphne just awakening from the swoon
Of tremulous laurels, lonely Salmacis
Had bared his barren beauty to the moon,
And through the vale with sad voluptuous smile
Antinous had wandered, the red lotus of the Nile
Down leaning from his black and clustering hair,
To shade those slumberous eyelids' caverned bliss,
Or else on yonder grassy slope with bare
High-tuniced limbs unravished Artemis
Had bade her hounds give tongue, and roused the deer
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