| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: MEANT WELL, TRIED A LITTLE, FAILED MUCH: - surely that may be his
epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at
the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field:
defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius! - but if there is
still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured. The
faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life-long
disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality
of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones;
there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and
the dust and the ecstasy - there goes another Faithful Failure!
From a recent book of verse, where there is more than one such
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: Perish and vanish, one by one, from earth:
Meanwhile, in the hall of song, the multitude
Applauds the new performer. One, perchance,
One ultimate survivor lingers on,
And smiles, and to his ancient heart recalls
The long forgotten. Ere the morrow die,
He too, returning, through the curtain comes,
And the new age forgets us and goes on.
XLII
SING me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say, could that lad be I?
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: a dilettante, but a savant.
His treatise on La Fontaine, in 1853, attracted much attention,
both the style and the matter being singularly fresh and
original. He has since republished it, with alterations which
serve to show that he can be docile toward intelligent
criticisms. About the same time he prepared for the French
Academy his work upon the historian Livy, which was crowned in
1855. Suffering then from overwork, he was obliged to make a
short journey to the Pyrenees, which he has since described in a
charming little volume, illustrated by Dore.
His subsequent works are a treatise on the French philosophers of
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
