| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: For oft to loving hearts, and waiting ears and sight,
The lads that went to forage returned not with the night.
Now first the children sickened, and then the women paled,
And the great arms of the warrior no more for war availed.
Hushed was the deep drum, discarded was the dance;
And those that met the priest now glanced at him askance.
The priest was a man of years, his eyes were ruby-red, (2)
He neither feared the dark nor the terrors of the dead,
He knew the songs of races, the names of ancient date;
And the beard upon his bosom would have bought the chief's estate.
He dwelt in a high-built lodge, hard by the roaring shore,
Ballads |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: the cry of the Northern shrike, of whom tradition says that he
catches little birds and impales them on sharp thorns. At the
sound of his voice the concert closes suddenly and the singers
vanish into thin air. The hour of music is over; the commonplace
of day has begun. And there is my lady Greygown, already up and
dressed, standing by the breakfast-table and laughing at my belated
appearance.
But the birds were not our only musicians at Kenogami. French
Canada is one of the ancestral homes of song. Here you can still
listen to those quaint ballads which were sung centuries ago in
Normandie and Provence. "A la Claire Fontaine," "Dans Paris y a-t-
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: things which subsist without growth, decay, or change, the only real,
only truly existing things, in short, are certain things which are not
seen; inappreciable by sense, or understanding, or imagination,
perceived only by the conscience and the reason. And that, again, the
problem of philosophy, the highest good for man, that for the sake of
which death were a gain, without which life is worthless, a drudgery, a
degradation, a failure, and a ruin, is to discover what those unseen
eternal things are, to know them, possess them, be in harmony with them,
and thereby alone to rise to any real and solid power, or safety, or
nobleness. It is a strange dream. But you will see that it is one
which does not bear much upon "points of controversy," any more than on
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