| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous by Oscar Wilde: me for some other short drama by Wilde to present at the same time,
as Salome does not take very long to play. I offered them the
fragment of A Florentine Tragedy. By a fortunate coincidence the
poet and dramatist, Mr. Thomas Sturge Moore, happened to be on the
committee of this Society, and to him was entrusted the task of
writing an opening scene to make the play complete. {1} It is not
for me to criticise his work, but there is justification for saying
that Wilde himself would have envied, with an artist's envy, such
lines as -
We will sup with the moon,
Like Persian princes that in Babylon
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: in many cases shut up, that a telephone wire had dropped here,
and that a cart stood abandoned by the wayside. But he would
still find his hunger whetted by the bright assurance that
Wilder's Canned Peaches were excellent, or that there was nothing
so good for the breakfast table as Gobble's Sausages. And then
suddenly would come the Dureresque element; the skeleton of a
horse, or some crumpled mass of rags in the ditch, with gaunt
extended feet and a yellow, purple-blotched skin and face, or
what had been a face, gaunt and glaring and devastated. Then
here would be a field that had been ploughed and not sown, and
here a field of corn carelessly trampled by beasts, and here a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs: warm spring.
The view that opened before me was the most sur-
prising that I have ever seen. In the hollow, which must
have covered several hundred acres, were numerous
fields of growing things, and working all about with
crude implements or with no implements at all other
than their bare hands were many of the brute-men en-
gaged in the first agriculture that I had seen within
Pellucidar.
They put me to work cultivating in a patch of melons.
I never was a farmer nor particularly keen for this sort
Pellucidar |
