| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: first time I felt my heart stirred by any other woman than my
betrothed whom I had left far away in England, and whom, as I
thought, I should never see again. And as I learned in after days
mine was not the only heart that was stirred that night.
Near to us sat another royal lady, Papantzin, the sister of
Montezuma, but she was neither young nor lovely, and yet most sweet
faced and sad as though with the presage of death. Indeed she died
not many weeks after but could not rest quiet in her grave, as
shall be told.
When the feast was done and we had drunk of the cocoa or chocolate,
and smoked tobacco in pipes, a strange but most soothing custom
Montezuma's Daughter |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: obligation to compose operas in versified numbers not only does
not embarrass him, but actually saves him trouble and thought. No
matter what his dramatic mood may be, he expresses it in
exquisite musical verses more easily than a dramatist of ordinary
singleness of talent can express it in prose. Accordingly, he
too, like Shakespeare and Shelley,leaves versified airs, like
Dalla sua pace, or Gluck's Che fare senza Euridice, or Weber's
Leise, leise, which are as dramatic from the first note to the
last as the untrammelled themes of The Ring. In consequence, it
used to be professorially demanded that all dramatic music should
present the same double aspect. The demand was unreasonable,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: that seemed most important to others and had seemed so to him
while he was in the service, and he now ascended a height from
which he could look down on those he had formerly envied. . . .
But it was not this alone, as his sister Varvara supposed, that
influenced him. There was also in him something else--a sincere
religious feeling which Varvara did not know, which intertwined
itself with the feeling of pride and the desire for pre-eminence,
and guided him. His disillusionment with Mary, whom he had
thought of angelic purity, and his sense of injury, were so
strong that they brought him to despair, and the despair led
him--to what? To God, to his childhood's faith which had never
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