| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: where they spend hours in admiration, and end by pinning appropriate
poems on the twigs for later comers to peruse. Fleeting as the
flowers are in fact, they live forever in fancy. For they
constitute one of the commonest motifs of both painting and poetry.
A branch just breaking into bloom seen against the sunrise sky, or a
bough bending its blossoms to the bosom of a stream, is subject
enough for their greatest masters, who thus wed, as it were,
two arts in one,--the spirit of poesy with pictorial form.
This plum-tree is but a blossom. Precocious harbinger of a host
of flowers, its gay heralding over, it vanishes not to be recalled,
for it bears no edible fruit.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: other logs on top of the first, resting against the stakes.
Now you are ready for the hand-chunks, or andirons. These are
shorter sticks of wood, eight or ten inches thick, laid at right
angles to the backlog, four or five feet apart. Across these you
are to build up the firewood proper.
Use a dry spruce-tree, not one that has fallen, but one that is dead
and still standing, if you want a lively, snapping fire. Use a hard
maple or a hickory if you want a fire that will burn steadily and
make few sparks. But if you like a fire to blaze up at first with a
splendid flame, and then burn on with an enduring heat far into the
night, a young white birch with the bark on is the tree to choose.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: German bed, too, and had the German bed's ineradicable
habit of spilling the blankets on the floor every time
you forgot yourself and went to sleep.
A round table as large as King Arthur's stood in the
center of the room; while the waiters were getting
ready to serve our dinner on it we all went out to see
the renowned clock on the front of the municipal buildings.
CHAPTER XII
[What the Wives Saved]
The RATHHAUS, or municipal building, is of the quaintest
and most picturesque Middle-Age architecture. It has a
|
