| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: and beautiful architecture. Visitors are charmed with its resemblance
to the old castles of song and story, with its towers, turreted walls,
and ivy-mantled porches.'
Keeping school in a castle is a romantic thing; as romantic as keeping
hotel in a castle.
By itself the imitation castle is doubtless harmless, and well enough;
but as a symbol and breeder and sustainer of maudlin Middle-Age romanticism
here in the midst of the plainest and sturdiest and infinitely greatest
and worthiest of all the centuries the world has seen, it is necessarily
a hurtful thing and a mistake.
Here is an extract from the prospectus of a Kentucky 'Female College.'
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: or amusement, why should you alone sit corroded with idle
melancholy? or why could not you bear for a few months that
condition to which they were condemned for life?"
"The diversions of the women," answered Pekuah, "were only childish
play, by which the mind accustomed to stronger operations could not
be kept busy. I could do all which they delighted in doing by
powers merely sensitive, while my intellectual faculties were flown
to Cairo. They ran from room to room, as a bird hops from wire to
wire in his cage. They danced for the sake of motion, as lambs
frisk in a meadow. One sometimes pretended to be hurt that the
rest might be alarmed, or hid herself that another might seek her.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: whom for this reason he gave a body, smooth and even, having a surface in
every direction equidistant from the centre, a body entire and perfect, and
formed out of perfect bodies. And in the centre he put the soul, which he
diffused throughout the body, making it also to be the exterior environment
of it; and he made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and
solitary, yet by reason of its excellence able to converse with itself, and
needing no other friendship or acquaintance. Having these purposes in view
he created the world a blessed god.
Now God did not make the soul after the body, although we are speaking of
them in this order; for having brought them together he would never have
allowed that the elder should be ruled by the younger; but this is a random
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