| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: conscience, and oftenest, perhaps, by the splendor of its
garments. Statesmen, rulers, generals, and all men who act over
an extensive sphere, are most liable to be deluded in this way;
they commit wrong, devastation, and murder, on so grand a scale,
that it impresses them as speculative rather than actual; but in
our procession we find them linked in detestable conjunction with
the meanest criminals whose deeds have the vulgarity of petty
details. Here the effect of circumstance and accident is done
away, and a man finds his rank according to the spirit of his
crime, in whatever shape it may have been developed.
We have called the Evil; now let us call the Good. The trumpet's
Mosses From An Old Manse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling: first met him. Eddi loathed it. It used to sniff at his thin legs and
cough at him. I can't say I ever took much notice of it (I was not
fond of animals), till one day Eddi came to me with a circumstantial
account of some witchcraft that Meon worked. He would
tell the seal to go down to the beach the last thing at night, and
bring him word of the weather. When it came back, Meon might
say to his slaves, "Padda thinks we shall have wind tomorrow.
Haul up the boats!" I spoke to Meon casually about the story, and
he laughed.
'He told me he could judge by the look of the creature's coat
and the way it sniffed what weather was brewing. Quite possible.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it and
talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at
present. I'm twenty-two. Things might happen to me anywhen. You
men can go out into the world if you like, to sin like fools and
marry like fools, not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask.
You'll take the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly,
sniggering a bit, sentimentalising a bit, like--like Cambridge
humorists. . . . I mean to know what I'm doing."
He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But
one is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than
one does the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not
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