| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Bucolics by Virgil: Committed to my care.
MENALCAS
O every way
Unhappy sheep, unhappy flock! while he
Still courts Neaera, fearing lest her choice
Should fall on me, this hireling shepherd here
Wrings hourly twice their udders, from the flock
Filching the life-juice, from the lambs their milk.
DAMOETAS
Hold! not so ready with your jeers at men!
We know who once, and in what shrine with you-
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: knowledge, and yet the statesman and the poet are inspired. There may be a
sort of irony in regarding in this way the gifts of genius. But there is
no reason to suppose that he is deriding them, any more than he is deriding
the phenomena of love or of enthusiasm in the Symposium, or of oracles in
the Apology, or of divine intimations when he is speaking of the daemonium
of Socrates. He recognizes the lower form of right opinion, as well as the
higher one of science, in the spirit of one who desires to include in his
philosophy every aspect of human life; just as he recognizes the existence
of popular opinion as a fact, and the Sophists as the expression of it.
This Dialogue contains the first intimation of the doctrine of reminiscence
and of the immortality of the soul. The proof is very slight, even
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: hour brings its duty, its prayer, its task, with such desperate
regularity that you can tell what a Carmelite sister is doing in any
place, at any hour of the night or day; that deadly dull routine,
which crushes out all interest in one's surroundings, had become for
us two a world of life and movement. Imagination had thrown open her
fairy realms, and in these our spirits ranged at will, each in turn
serving as magic steed to the other, the more alert quickening the
drowsy; the world from which our bodies were shut out became the
playground of our fancy, which reveled there in frolicsome adventure.
The very /Lives of the Saints/ helped us to understand what was so
carefully left unsaid! But the day when I was reft of your sweet
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