| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: During the first three hundred years after Columbus's discovery,
there wasn't ever more than one good lecture audience of white
people, all put together, in America - I mean the whole thing,
British Possessions and all; in the beginning of our century there
were only 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 - say seven; 12,000,000 or
14,000,000 in 1825; say 23,000,000 in 1850; 40,000,000 in 1875.
Our death-rate has always been 20 in 1000 per annum. Well, 140,000
died the first year of the century; 280,000 the twenty-fifth year;
500,000 the fiftieth year; about a million the seventy-fifth year.
Now I am going to be liberal about this thing, and consider that
fifty million whites have died in America from the beginning up to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: The soldiers, confident in superiority of numbers, paused. The abbot took
advantage of the pause to introduce a word of exhortation. "My children,"
said he, "if you are going to cut each other's throats, I entreat you,
in the name of peace and charity, to do it out of the chapel."
"Sweet Matilda," said the earl, "did you give your love to
the Earl of Huntingdon, whose lands touch the Ouse and the Trent,
or to Robert Fitz-Ooth, the son of his mother?"
"Neither to the earl nor his earldom," answered Matilda firmly,
"but to Robert Fitz-Ooth and his love."
"That I well knew," said the earl; "and though the ceremony
be incomplete, we are not the less married in the eye
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: So the lion-like woman idly wearied the air
For awhile, and pierced men's hearing in vain, and wounded their hearts.
But as when the weather changes at sea, in dangerous parts,
And sudden the hurricane wrack unrolls up the front of the sky,
At once the ship lies idle, the sails hang silent on high,
The breath of the wind that blew is blown out like the flame of a lamp,
And the silent armies of death draw near with inaudible tramp:
So sudden, the voice of her weeping ceased; in silence she rose
And passed from the house of her sorrow, a woman clothed with repose,
Carrying death in her breast and sharpening death with her hand.
Hither she went and thither in all the coasts of the land.
Ballads |
