| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence: Miriam was her mother's daughter. In the sunshine of the
afternoon mother and daughter went down the fields with him.
They looked for nests. There was a jenny wren's in the hedge
by the orchard.
"I DO want you to see this," said Mrs. Leivers.
He crouched down and carefully put his finger through the
thorns into the round door of the nest.
"It's almost as if you were feeling inside the live body
of the bird," he said, "it's so warm. They say a bird makes
its nest round like a cup with pressing its breast on it.
Then how did it make the ceiling round, I wonder?"
Sons and Lovers |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: this lesson of dependence, by indicating the negative
conditions which are as necessary for any effect, in their
absence, as is the presence of this great fraternity of
positive conditions, not any one of which can claim priority
over any other. But the fable does not end here, as perhaps,
in all logical strictness, it should. It wanders off into a
discussion as to which is the truer greatness, that of the
vanquished fire or that of the victorious rain. And the
speech of the rain is charming:
'Lo, with my little drops I bless again
And beautify the fields which thou didst blast!
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: carefully analyzed, can be imagined to have proceeded from the hand or mind
of Plato. The other testimonies to the voyages of Plato to Sicily and the
court of Dionysius are all of them later by several centuries than the
events to which they refer. No extant writer mentions them older than
Cicero and Cornelius Nepos. It does not seem impossible that so attractive
a theme as the meeting of a philosopher and a tyrant, once imagined by the
genius of a Sophist, may have passed into a romance which became famous in
Hellas and the world. It may have created one of the mists of history,
like the Trojan war or the legend of Arthur, which we are unable to
penetrate. In the age of Cicero, and still more in that of Diogenes
Laertius and Appuleius, many other legends had gathered around the
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