| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's Gallery;
greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because
its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller
variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced
lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these,
indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and
emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought,
with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always
think, even as Literature is the greater art. Who, again, cares
whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something
that Lionardo never dreamed of? The painter may have been merely
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming time.
Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in
its full stature and native hues in the sunshine. Then shall God's
minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity.
Then shall beauty - Divinity taking outlines and color - light upon
the souls of men as the butterfly, image of the beatified spirit
rising from the dust, soars from the shell that held a poor grub,
which would never have found wings, had not the stone been lifted.
You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a
terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population
that dwells under it.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: boy. A little green worm came crawling over a dewy
leaf, lifting two-thirds of his body into the air from time
to time and "sniffing around," then proceeding again --
for he was measuring, Tom said; and when the worm
approached him, of its own accord, he sat as still as a
stone, with his hopes rising and falling, by turns, as the
creature still came toward him or seemed inclined to
go elsewhere; and when at last it considered a painful
moment with its curved body in the air and then came
decisively down upon Tom's leg and began a journey
over him, his whole heart was glad -- for that meant
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
