| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: the sounds, until verbs are mingled with nouns; then the words fit, and the
smallest combination of them forms language, and is the simplest and least
form of discourse.
THEAETETUS: Again I ask, What do you mean?
STRANGER: When any one says 'A man learns,' should you not call this the
simplest and least of sentences?
THEAETETUS: Yes.
STRANGER: Yes, for he now arrives at the point of giving an intimation
about something which is, or is becoming, or has become, or will be. And
he not only names, but he does something, by connecting verbs with nouns;
and therefore we say that he discourses, and to this connexion of words we
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: Christian Rome which had flung itself into the waters to escape the
Barbarians, was already powerful and illustrious, and the head of the
political and commercial world.
With a few rare exceptions this brilliant nobility has fallen into
utter ruin. Among the gondoliers who serve the English--to whom
history here reads the lesson of their future fate--there are
descendants of long dead Doges whose names are older than those of
sovereigns. On some bridge, as you glide past it, if you are ever in
Venice, you may admire some lovely girl in rags, a poor child
belonging, perhaps, to one of the most famous patrician families. When
a nation of kings has fallen so low, naturally some curious characters
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Distorted hideously,--
An owl's they might be now.
What is it, askest thou?
Is't love, or is't ennui?
'Tis both at once, I vow.
1767-9.
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DIFFERENT THREATS.
I ONCE into a forest far
My maiden went to seek,
And fell upon her neck, when: "Ah!"
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